What can we learn from the daily routines of creative people

One example of visual information that I find particularly successful is the "Daily Routines of Famous Creative People". This exhibit presents information about artists, writers and musicians by using bullet graphs to denote the amount of time they spend on certain activities throughout the course of a day.

[Image] Daily Routines of Creative People, Padio https://podio.com/site/creative-routines

One of the reasons I find the bullet charts so successful in conveying this information is that I can easily identify the length of time spent by each person on each activity by simply scanning the visual. The bullet graph takes advantage of Gestalt principles of line length and color. These features facilitate the mechanisms of grouping, reorganizing, and centering. This is so useful because it helps the audience understand the structural requirements of the problem. Thanks to these principals we can view the problems as separate pieces in relation to a whole. (Meirelles, p23). 

The visual goes a step further and includes some interactivity, allowing the user to filter the results so that you can compare time spent or time of day of different activities. These filters let us compare the lengths of time and time of day of each artist against one another, aiding in exploratory research. Simple preattentive properties such as length, orientation, and hue offload mental processing to the viewer's visual cortex. This helps bridge the gap between vision and visualization. (Few, n.d.)

Daily routines reimagined 

If there was something I could change about this visual it would probably be the title. There isn't any information about how this data was collected so it's not clear whether we are seeing the result of averages that are displaying large amounts of data or if we are seeing a snapshot in time. In other words, it's hard to tell if this accounts for a year, a few months, or a specific day of a creative person. I would also argue that in order to understand the daily routine of someone you may need to look at how they spend their week. This way you not only learn how long they spend on an activity but also how often and which days they performed those activities.   

If I reimagine this visual so that we can see how an individual creative person spends their week it might look something like this: 

Now we can look for new patterns that might emerge from the data giving us a more complete picture of their daily routine. I also used a very descriptive title letting the audience know how and when I prepared the data. Maybe you can draw a comparison of Jane Doe's activities to her age or events that were happening in the world during the time the data was collected. Considering that here in 2021 we are currently in the COVID 19 pandemic you can see how important this information is when you think of how the audience interacts with the data. 

  

References 

Daily Routines of Creative People, Padio https://podio.com/site/creative-routines

Meirelles, Isabel. Design for Information : An Introduction to the Histories, Theories, and Best Practices Behind Effective Information Visualizations, Quarto Publishing Group USA, 2006. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/empire-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3399922.

Few, Stephen (n.d.), 35. Data Visualization for Human Perception, Interaction Design Foundation, https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/book/the-encyclopedia-of-human-computer-interaction-2nd-ed/data-visualization-for-human-perception