The minute I saw on Twitter, that Sarah Bartlett announced the next Iron Quest topic to be quantified self data, I knew I would make a series of my Couchella viz and enter the challenge. I was riding my bike yesterday to the pharmacy to save my head from being exploded when the idea popped into my mind. I’m gonna draw the layout of my flat and make a heatmap of what I’m doing where for how long in the apartment!
The goal was to have the same styling as the Couchella one (about my streaming activity during the first 3 weeks of quarantine), so I decided to stick to my favorite Futura font and used the same colors (background – #231f20, purple – #8000ff, pink – #ff2079, blue – #440bd4) and opacity (60%). There’s gonna be a third one to follow these two at the end of next week, so stay tuned! Until then, you can have a look at My Fallen Kingdom viz on Tableau Public.
Like many other things, it all started at Starschema a couple of months ago, when I tried to explain to my colleagues why I moved from one room to the other. It was a very hot summer and I was waiting for my AC, so, for the time being I had to secure the way of air, so that I could sleep at night. To achieve that tiny air motion that could be achieved, I moved to the living room. As I’m a visual type and the others couldn’t get the gist of it, I started to draw my flat on the whiteboard to illustrate the way of air.
That started a movement within our team and in a couple of days, the whole room was full of flat layouts. I’m not saying this was my proudest moment at Starschema, but it’s definitely in the top 3.
At first, I thought, that I’ll be able to sketch it up from memory, but after an hour I had to take out a measuring tape to get the exact proportion of the rooms. All the details and comments I figured out on the bike the day before, so I just needed to put it on a canvas. We were having a Tableau Featured authors call in the afternoon and the incredible Zach Bowders asked me if everything in my apartment was from IKEA.. and it is! So that’s when I decided to add that Ikea twinge to it! This was the layout I put into Tableau as a background image:
After that, I created an Excel file of all the activities I do at home on an average day (size means the time spent) and added the X & Y coordinates to have the scatterplot. This was the hardest part, as I gave an estimated value to all of them, but had to adjust the bubbles one by one. After 40 minutes of finetuning it, this is the outcome:
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