As the future saying goes, to know thyself is to track thyself. In the digital age, we’re creating records of our behavior all the time. But some of us keep data more intentionally than others. Self-quantifiers take it to the next level, charting the calories in every meal, wearing brain-wave-monitoring headbands to sleep, and searching for meaning in the data they accumulate. The Quantified Self, a community for the personal-data obsessed, held its first conference in San Francisco this year.
One of the original self-trackers, Nicholas Felton has been meticulously recording the details of his life since 2005—every meal eaten, hayride taken, page turned —and compiling it all in his Feltron Annual Reports. Along with fellow designer Ryan Case, Felton created Daytum, a website and iPhone app that helps people track their own activities and organize the resulting data in bar charts and pie graphs. The site enables just about anyone to be a casual “Feltron,” if there is such a thing.
In April, Facebook hired Felton and Case as product designers. With or without their help, social networking and personal statistics seem likely to converge in the future.
So we took a closer look at Felton’s Annual Reports. Part detective story, part graphic-design porn, the reports are as interesting for what they leave out as for what they highlight. After reading page after page of statistics about Felton’s daily life, it’s hard not to feel like you know him. We asked a couple of people who actually do (his mom and his girlfriend)—and Felton himself—whether the charts are getting it right.
It can be frustrating seeing change for change’s sake in the world. To be more specific, changes that are said to be done in the name of innovation and design, but are in truth ways for companies to save a buck.
One example that is getting attention is the bathroom doors in hotels… or the lack thereof, actually. One TikToker has had enough and has taken it upon herself to save regular bathroom doors in hotels and to point out why open-space bathrooms and glass doors just don’t cut it.
On her @bring_back_doors TikTok account, Sadie has a collection of videos highlighting the flaws in hotel bathroom designs, with the most prominent being the lack of a regular door to the bathroom. In one viral TikTok, Sadie discussed a hotel that reached out to her, explaining that they have “foggy” glass doors to their bathroom to provide privacy. She was quick to point out that it still doesn’t provide adequate privacy. “Yes you can see through these,” Sadie said, adding that “glass doors do not close properly.”
Hotel name: Alexander Hotel, Noordwijk aan Zee, Netherlands I need to be clear. Glass doors are not private. And making them foggy does not make them private. I am once again sitting here saying screw you to all bathroom doors that are not solid and close fully. And I am providing alternative hotels with guaranteed doors at bringbackdoors.com Check your hotels door situation before you book or risk your privacy. Door submitted by @mmargaridahb, DM me to submit your own bad doors. #bathroomdoors#hotel#travel#fyp Bathroom doors | bathroom design | hotel design | bad hotel design | travel fail | travel memories | travel inspo | door design | hotels with privacy
The comments rallied behind Sadie’s bathroom-door crusade
The commenters joined in with Sadie, demanding the return of solid, closing, and lockable doors to bathrooms in hotels:
“I HATE how hotels started thinking going to the bathroom is a shared experience.”
“I hate how you can’t turn the bathroom light on without disturbing the other person in the room.”
“The foggy ones are almost worse, you just get a hazy fleshy silhouette hunched over on the crapper like some kind of sack of ham.”
“I just don’t get it, NOBODY wants this, even couples. I won’t be more likely to book two separate rooms for me and my friend/sibling/parent, I’ll just book another hotel.”
“Love this campaign, I do not want a romantic weekend listening to the other person poo.”
Hotel Names⬇️⬇️ Citizen M South Hotel (first pics) and Fletcher Hotel (third pic) both in Amsterdam. As part of this project, I’ve been emailing hotels around the world to put together an easy to reference list for people to find hotels with guaranteed doors at BringBackDoors.com And I did notice that in Amsterdam a lot of hotels were saying they don’t have doors. It wasn’t the worst city (that honor goes to Barcelona, so far I’ve only found TWO that have said yes to all doors), but it was still bad. Then I went into the comments. And kept getting people mentioning these hotels in Amsterdam. And I realized that clearly the city has a designer or architect on the loose who has a thing for test tubes. It’s horrible. Luckily, I was able to find 6 hotels in Amsterdam that all have bathroom doors in every room and have them all listed on BringBackDoors.com These hotels were submitted by so many people I couldn’t name them all. But to submit your own bad hotel bathroom send me a DM with hotel photo, name, and location! #hotel#bathroom#hoteldesignfail Bathroom doors | hotel bathrooms | hotel privacy | no privacy | travel problems | hotel issues | travel | hotel design | hotel design fail | hotel designers | design fail | hotel concept | bathrooms | Citizen M | Hotel Fletcher | Hotels in Amsterdam | Visit Amsterdam | Amsterdam
A great way to save a buck—er, I mean, ‘create a modern look’
As many commenters asked, why do hotels have glass doors — or, worse, no doors at all—in their bathrooms? Well, this has been a growing trend in modern hotels over the past decade as a means to create a sleek aesthetic and to allow glass partitions to bring more daylight into otherwise darker sections of the room.
At least that’s what’s being promoted to the customer. In reality, skimping on solid doors for glass ones or none at all gives the illusion that the room is bigger than it is while requiring fewer building materials. It does bring in more daylight, but mostly with the hope that you’ll cut down on electricity use for lights in an otherwise enclosed space. These reasons are also why some hotels don’t have solid walls around their bathroom areas at all.
Tired of the lack of privacy? Check out the database
To combat this trend, Sadie has developed a database at bringbackdoors.com for her and her followers to report which hotels have true, solid, private bathrooms in their accommodations and which ones do not, so people can properly plan where to stay and have true privacy during their most vulnerable moments.
“I get it, you can save on material costs and make the room feel bigger, but what about my dignity?,” Sadie wrote on her website. “I can’t save that, when you don’t include a bathroom door.”
Over time, the hope is that sanity and dignity can be restored as hotels realize that their glass “features” don’t have any real benefit when they don’t allow basic privacy.
A camera developed at MIT can photograph a trillion frames per second. Compare that with a traditional movie camera which takes a mere 24. This new advancement in photographic technology has given scientists the ability to photograph the movement of the fastest thing in the Universe, light. In the video below, you’ll see experimental footage of light photons traveling 600-million-miles-per-hour through water.
The actual event occurred in a nano second, but the camera has the ability to slow it down to twenty seconds. For some perspective, according to New York Times writer, John Markoff, “If a bullet were tracked in the same fashion moving through the same fluid, the resulting movie would last three years.”
It’s impossible to directly record light so the camera takes millions of scans to recreate each image. The process has been called femto-photography and according to Andrea Velten, a researcher involved with the project, “There’s nothing in the universe that looks fast to this camera.”
It’s super easy for most people to get hung up on the number on their scales and not how they actually look or, most importantly, feel. People often go on diets in hopes of reaching an ideal weight they had when they graduated high school or got married, but they’re often disappointed when they can’t attain it.
But a set of photos by fitness blogger Kelsey Wells is a great reminder for everyone to put their scales back in storage. Welles is best known as the voice and body behind My Sweat Life, a blog she started after gaining weight during pregnancy. To lose the weight, she started the Bikini Body Guide (BBG) training program and after 84 weeks she shared three photos on her Instagram account that prove the scale doesn’t matter.
