Burning the Midnight Candles: Physicalizing my Sleep Data by National Institute of Design

Burning the Midnight Candles 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 made three stacked bar graphs using tealight candles. Each stack represented the days on which I slept early, at mid-time, and late respectively. The red color tealight candles represent days on which I had poor sleep quality, the purple tealight candles represent days on which I had medium sleep quality and the blue tealight candles represent days on which I had 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.