I’ve attempted similar personal projects in the past, such as The Hundred Day Project, and there is always bumps in the road. In the beginning, I’m enthusiastic but still trying to build the muscle memories to make the activity a habit.
I had a low tech idea at the start of collecting fingerprints as a mark of measure for the people I meet. (Haha, security issues.) I would only ask friends to contribute – which makes it a bias measure – but the main problem was that I never remembered until the meeting was over. So all week, I had been walking around with an ink pad and gathering no fingerprints.
The other option was to follow the Dear Data guideline and draw my commute through public spaces. I had turned on Google Fit as a tracker, but the app had some built in data viz function that it became a creativity block.
Going back to the original idea of visualizing contacts, I decided to switch up the mark making tool as a means to get past creativity block.
I forgot what a pain in the ass watercolor is to work with.Sure, it’s freeing in that it flows easily and creates interesting patterns through absorption patterns, but water tension is a difficult thing to manage. I’d imagine that there would be radiant bursts of colors but the result would be a booger of a blob. Fortunately, the more blobs I made, the better they became.