Steven Dean

October 21, 2011

-This review was written by Craig Protzel for my class DIY Health at NYU ITP (Tisch School of the Arts). In this class, students design systems of self-care that help people take stock of themselves by exploring ways to measure, reflect and act upon their health and lifestyle.-

Marie Dapuch’s “Mood Tracking” is very much focused on the qualified self and how the user feels.  Dapuch created a rating scale based on colors as a visual metric, and a self-reported quantifiable metric, to gauge her mood over periods of time.  While her process of assigning values is entirely subjective, and one might argue lacking in “scientific rigor,” Dapuch’s project is extremely relevant, highly impactful, and overwhelmingly touching.

Overall, she was able to design and develop a system of enormous significance in the improvement of her own life.  By implementing it on a mobile device, she successfully integrated the tracking process into her daily routine, allowing for even more in depth analysis.  All of this effort gave her the awareness and information to make confident choices in her own life, particularly to pursue a career path in advertising, to not spend so much time with her sister, and, most recently, to avoid the A train.  Her presentation is inspiring in that you clearly see how a simple yet effective system of self-monitoring can have such a positive effect on a person’s life. (Filmed at the NY Quantified Self Show&Tell #13 at NYU ITP.)