Hitting the Pillow: Physicalizing my Sleep Data by National Institute of Design

'Hitting the Pillow' is an exploration to visualize my sleep data over 45 days. This tangible data visualization helped me understand how the time at which I sleep affected the quality of my sleep.

During the pandemic lockdown, my sleep schedule was messed up. I decided to journal sleep time, the quality of sleep, my mood at the end of the day, and activities on the Daylio app to keep a track of it. In this academic project, I analyzed this dataset and presented it through tangible data visualization explorations.

For this tangible data visualization, I used three pillows to represent my sleep data. The size of the pillow corresponds to the number of days on which I slept late, early, or at mid-time. The initial idea was to use raat rani or flowers that bloom at night to represent the quality of sleep. As these flowers weren't available, I decided to go ahead with flowers I could find at a local market. The dried flowers represent bad sleep quality, the wilted ones represent medium sleep quality and the fresh ones represent good sleep quality.

From this project I learned how the time at which I slept had an impact on the quality of my sleep and that I slept late on most days. On all the days I had bad quality sleep, I slept late. On most days when I slept early, I had good quality sleep.