Ski Season 2023: As told in crochet by Maryland Institute College of Art

This crocheted scarf is a personal data physicalization project created to celebrate the 2023 ski season—my first year back after dislocating a knee in 2022. Data was collected using the Slopes app, checked against ski resort trail maps, processed in Excel, and then crocheted according to trail difficulty and distance in vertical feet. Solid-colored yarn was used to encode difficulty, while white speckled yarn demarcated the beginning and end of ski days. Each stitch represents 10 vertical feet, totaling 82,848 vertical feet, 89 runs, and 9 days of skiing in 3 different American states: Pennsylvania, Vermont, and Utah.

Instead of using full rows of color to create even stripes, I was interested in how the stitches would change and flow organically to visually represent my efforts over each day at different ski resorts in different regions.

This project was developed during my time in the Data Analytics & Visualization, MPS program at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). The scarf was initially concepted for an assignment titled "The Quantified Self", which asked us to collect personal data and represent it in a non-traditional format. To showcase the completed scarf, I built a website in September 2023 for a separate course called "Interactive Data Storytelling", for an assignment that asked us to bring a static visualization to life using interactivity.