Tracking my Food Habits
THE BRIEF
Student Project
October - November 2020
The goal of this project was to collect personal data over a period of 4 weeks and represent them visually, which will enable us to study patterns and connections.
I wanted to delve deeper into my eating habits - the calorie intake, the frequency, ingredients, favorite foods, cook-time, and how good I felt eating it during the day.
I designed an infographic poster with static visuals that convey all the intricate details and patterns in my food journey.
Scroll further to see the iterative process!
iteration #1
how do I represent the data?
I love to cook and innovate a variety of dishes in the kitchen depending on what I have in my pantry or the fridge. Through the 4 weeks, I wanted to understand if I’m eating healthy, or if I’m having a sufficient intake of dairy products and vegetables.
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On to the right is the first sketch of a really basic radial line graph that portrays all the food items that I had from the 14th of October until the 11th of November. Through the spider charts, I’ve tried to map my food consumption, food attributes like flavor, and physiological attributes which are a result of my food choices.
inspiration & goals
I admire Giorgia Lupi's work as she takes a humanistic approach to data. She gives life to data by designing engaging visual narratives that reconnect numbers to what they stand for: stories, people, and ideas.
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For this project, I used a similar approach wherein I tried to create a visually driven experience around my dataset of the food I had over 4 weeks.
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Each "mark" on the graph represents one parameter that I recorded on my food intake. The figure on the right shows an initial idea of how I wanted to portray my dataset.
For example, the length of each bar on the radial graph represents the calorie count of each food item. The color of each bar represents the flavor associated with the item; whether its salty, spicy, sweet or sour.
the data collection
I collected my food data over 4 weeks , recording every item that I consumed incorporating both quantitative as well as qualitative parameters. I wanted to add personal data to make my graphic unique and relevant to my lifestyle. I asked myself questions like:
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1. Am I satisfied with what I eat? ( it could be guilt of having junk food or overeating, or just how the taste of food that made me feel that day on a rating of 1 to 3).
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2. Do I make my most favorite items too often? (but they are favorite for a reason)
3. What flavors do I eat/like the most?
4. I tend to make dishes with a lot of ingredients. Could I reduce that so that it is more economical and less time-consuming? (but also, I love flavors)
5. Amount of time I spend cooking, or how often do I spend too much time cooking?
6. Can I relate to certain events during the 4 weeks that affected my food habits?
7. Am I having enough dairy in my diet?
iteration #2
how do I want my visual to look like?
I sketched out how I was going to map all the quantitative and qualitative attributes of my data by expanding my radial line graph into a holistic visualization, highlighting certain events that caused fluctuations in my food patterns.
The "read this way" represents a legend:
For example,
- The hearts depict all the favorite foods I had in that one month,
- The gray swatches under the radial lines show the satisfaction levels through one day on a scale of 1 to 3; the darker the gray, the more satisfied I was.
The spider charts represent a distribution of intake in dairy, nuts/seeds, fruits, vegetables, pulses, and junk for every week.
iteration #3
mapping the data | design layout
I made this on the 27th of October and I still had a week's data left to collect. So I translated my sketch digitally by mapping my data on "calorie intake" and "flavor" as the colored radial lines, using Tableau.
Each bar on the graph represents a food item I had: length of each bar indicating the calorie count, and color indicating the flavor (sweet, salty, spicy, bland, sour)
I also decided to give summarised values from the spider charts in percentages or counts as an "inference", so it keeps the reader engaged, and makes my visualization more meaningful.
the final design
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To make this project as personal as possible, I analyzed patterns in my food consumption that resonated with my emotional/physiological state and the events that occurred during every week.
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The radial line graph is sub-divided into four sectors, each sector marking one week, and each "satisfaction" segment representing each day in a clockwise direction.
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A brief inference of the spider charts at the bottom gives an overview of how much cooked, processed, and roasted/baked/frozen food I consumed.
This infographic-poster measures 11" x 17" and makes a great print piece. The circular forms of the visualizations were inspired by plates.
I went with a dark color theme so that I could accentuate the colored bars that represent flavors.
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Tools Used: Procreate, Microsoft Excel, Tableau, Adobe Illustrator, The Noun Project