For the final project, my topic is “What’s the secret of happiness”, I chose this topic because nowadays people are getting less happier and people around me including me feel stressed these days. Therefore, it gave me the idea to explore if there is any way to make people feel happy. My targeted audience for this project is anyone who want to cheer themselves up or anyone who is interested in happiness.
Based on the interview results, I narrowed the contents and the focus of the storyline. It seems like people are more interested in what things make the other people feel happy in their daily life, what categories these examples fall into and what subjects, verbs and objects appears the most of times in the database collected from the survey results.
I construct the whole storyline according to the structure learnt from the course in a sequence of setup, conflicts and action. The setup is about nowadays people are getting less happier and always being unhappy does harm to people’s physical health. The conflicts is that happiness doesn’t need complex activities and the action is about according to the analysis of the HappyDB , there are many simple things people could do to be happy. When I am designing the stories on shorthand, I changed several times about how to organize the graph and text and how to use animation to make points stand out in a clearer way.
For most of the graphs used in the presentation, I used Flourish to design them. For the final graph showed on the presentation, I was inspired by the analysis of What Makes People the Most Happy by Nathan Yau. Based on one of the graphs in this document, I also added the category distribution for different objects to present example senteneces from the database. I first used Flourish to draw the stacked bar distribution graph based on the data analysis of HappyDB with Python. After that, I used Xmind to design the Mind graph to show the example sentences from the database which were divided into three parts, subjects, verbs and objects. I also put their category distribution calculated from the data under the word.
I used shorthand as the tool to present my final work. How to be Happier
HappyDB: A Corpus of 100,000 Crowdsourced Happy Moments
HappyDB Data Source Github Page