Assignment3
Jessie Chin (Human Factors)
Goals:
My visualization on the mail system has two main purposes:
One is to maintain the relationship from a long distance; the other is to establish the global
view of social networking. As an international student, I relied on the email as the main channel
to contact my parents, sister, boyfriend and friends in hometown. Sometimes during the
mid-term or final exam, the connection with my family would decline unconsciously. Therefore,
I did get mails from my close others to remind me for taking care myself or trying to get more
involvement with my life. This visualization will help me “see” the maintenance of each
relationship. If I forgot to reply email to a friend for a certain time, I’ll easily remind myself from
the visualization of mail system. Not only for the international students or people who lived far
away from their family, as the global economic connected more tightly, there was a trend that
people with intimacy may not live in the same city. Thus, the need to maintain a long-distance
relationship might be more important in the near future.
The basic layout
The visualization was based on a global map which specified the living cities of senders and
receivers. I used the color wave as a metaphor of interpersonal relationship which implied how
frequently people contacted each other. If two people contacted each other a lot, the
bandwidth of the wave would be broader. For example, there was a relatively thin purple wave
