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52 Weeks of Phone Calls with Mom
Project type
Personal gift by data visualization
Date
February 2025
Location
NYC
Audience
Audience: This is largely meant for myself and my mom. It's a gift to my mom and I wanted to make it super appealing looking, as my mom isn't much of a data person, but loves sentimental gifts and colorful decoration. A minimal poster with a background story felt perfect for my 1 person audience!
Data
To collect phone call history, as my phone doesn't allow phone call history downloads, and to save myself a painful connection with my phone service provider, I collected data from the last year (December 2023 to December 2024). Data includes: completed incoming, completed outgoing, and incomplete missed calls (either incoming or outgoing), call duration (by minutes), and call date.
Colors and Type
I wanted a colorful, clean, and minimalistic poster - the font chosen is Alice and each season has a bit of a warmer toned color. I based choosing each color by thinking back to when I was a kid growing up and how each season made me feel/how it made me think of my mom.
Towards the end of my MICA MPS program, I wanted to create a personal and sentimental gift that also utilized the skills I've picked up on so far as a data visualizer (it's incredibly hard to call myself one, but I need to manifest :))
This brings the little baby data viz I created as a poster to gift for my mom!
Analysis: After gathering perspectives from both completed and incomplete phone calls, I realized I wanted to shift my focus solely on completed phone calls. Missed/incomplete phone calls do not really have a story to tell :). After cleaning and basic descriptive stats, I had the highest and lowest call duration, average length of phone call, which month had the least and most amount of phone calls, etc.
First Iteration and Story: I decided, because it was Christmas season, I wanted to use a poinsettia to represent our phone call history. Using R, I dived a little deeper, and created a couple of dataframes that conglomerated each month's incoming and outgoing phone calls, giving me a 4x3 radar chart on a grid.
Second Iteration and Story: This lead to using one 52 week grid, created from R, and used in Canva to make minimalistic posters with a little background story. My mom and I have great conversations - I wanted to highlight how she's helped me this year and how much fun we have during our talks. 158 phone calls, 3043 minutes total, and both of us are laughing our asses off at how silly and stupid the last year has been.
