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

'Burning the Midnight Candles' is a data art 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 multicolored candles using red, purple, and blue colored wax. Each candle represents the days on which I slept early, at mid-time, and late respectively. The amount of candle burnt would show whether it represents sleeping early, at mid-time, or late. Since one would have to burn the candle for a long time on days they slept late, the candle representing the days I slept late was burnt for the longest. The red color represents days on which I had poor sleep quality, purple represents days on which I had medium sleep quality and blue represents 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. On all the days I had bad quality sleep, I slept late. On most days when I slept early, I had good quality sleep.