Radical Imperfection in Time-Tracking

School of Machines, Making & Make-Believe presents a 5-week online class dedicated to data, coding, visualisation and the quantified self.
About this Event

What makes the experience of observing our creative selves through data surprising, intriguing, and even healing?

/ Five-week Live* Online class begins 9. February ends 9. March

/ Every Tuesday, 7pm-9pm, CET

/ Small class of participants

/ Book tickets here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/radical-imperfection-in-time-tracking-tickets-133855033007

Course Description

Winter is the season of taking stock, reflecting, and preparing for the energy of spring. But where does our time go exactly? In this course, we will be taking a closer look at the intersection of time-tracking and tracking creative energy. Neither time tracking nor creative energy needs to be limited to things that relate to "work," especially if that work is alienating, or if work and home boundaries have blurred. We will stay inclusive and open-minded in observing our expressive and creative experiences through data.

This is a technical course: it draws on information and data visualization techniques and creative coding as tools for working with self-tracking and time-spent-on-task data. However, it does not end there: the aim is to mobilize these technical tools for deeply personal challenges.

In this practice-based course, we will work together on understanding, healing, and enriching our relationship to our creative energy. Through a combination of reflective sketching exercises and critical technical discussion, we will use systematic self-reflection (e.g., self-tracking) to capture data about how our time is spent, especially on projects we are passionate about. Although these techniques can also be used for productivity and creativity "hacking" or optimizing, we will be interrogating our own relationship to these concepts.

Participants can choose any medium to give this data an interesting or insightful form. Examples in the course will use primarily Toggl data and p5.js / openprocessing.org (all free and work in the browser), but participants can pick any other tools for collection of data or its representation. Participants can also work on finding and critiquing existing visualizations relevant to course themes, or to their specific interests.

The last session of the course will be used to share projects in which everyone can get more in-depth feedback from their peers. No prior technical experience is required, and all methods (digital or analog) are equally welcome.

Instructor
Kit Kuksenok https://www.instagram.com/xn_ze_ro/

Kit Kuksenok is a visual artist with a research background in Human Computer Interaction, and experience as a code/data worker in both academia and industry. Their interest in self-tracking, both through analog and digital media, has only grown since first trying out tracking work time in a spreadsheet in 2008, as a result of watching Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture. They have used many software and hardware tools for tracking, including using their own analysis scripts; since 2019, a large portion of their self-tracking activities has been pen-and-paper, and all strongly influenced by yoga philosophy.