Lab 4 - Happy Places

Happy Places are Inside and Outside

One of the most effective ways to improve one’s mood is with a change of location. Most people have a place or two that continuously provide relief from life’s stressors and have an uplifting effect on an individual’s state of mind. The association people have with these places is oftentimes personal and they become ‘happy places’ for unique reasons and as a result of individual experiences. For this reason, the types of places identified can vary greatly in respect to all major characteristics, such as location, activities, average time spent, and reason for going. 

Within the class data used for this project, I noticed that the happy places identified were pretty evenly split between indoor and outdoor locations. Having been in Seattle for five years, four of those I have spent living with native Seattleites, I have had first hand exposure to the quirks of Seattle natives. The biggest thing I have noticed about people from here is that they are absolutely obsessed with the outdoors and the sun and the winters turn them into hermits who never cease to complain about the gray skies and persistent rain. So many of my friends talk about how depressed and lonely they are in the winter time, but they cite slight drizzle as a reason to stay home as often as possible, which seems counterintuitive. As soon as the sun is out though, so are the people. There is a palpable shift in the energy of the city when summer time rolls around and it becomes difficult to find a single park or hiking trail that isn’t absolutely overrun. It would seem logical to me that people’s happy places would be located outside far more often than they would inside, but this didn’t seem to be the case. 

Outdoor locations did make up a higher percentage of the data points, but not by too much. What became increasingly apparent is that the way people spend their time indoors and outdoors is very different and the reasons they seek out their happy places are different. Those who picked outdoor locations, such as parks and the UW Quad, chose them in large part as a way to take their mind off of school and unwind. Those who picked indoor locations, such as cafes and libraries, cited their reason as being a good place to study and ‘take shelter.’ The data seems to represent well the mindset of a Seattleite, but the very specific subsect that is students at the University of Washington.

In terms of the project experience, I found this lab to be easier to handle because I didn’t have to coordinate my schedule with others. I would say there are definitely upsides to group work, such as having to do less overall and having people to work through the project with, but sometimes it is so difficult to divide work and make sure it all gets done at the right time and the right way. I did struggle with the coding part of the project, because for previous labs, I did take on less of the coding responsibility and more of other aspects. I did have trouble with formatting the text in my chart and spent far too much time on that. I used x and y values within the annotation chunks to locate the various pieces of text in the chart, but the code executed inconsistently and I couldn’t really understand how it worked. I spent a long time trying to make sure the author, date of creation, and credit would appear in a chunk in the bottom right corner, but no matter what I set the values to, only two of the three lines would appear in the chart and they remained weirdly spaced regardless of what I changed the values to. If I was to do that again, I would like to have worked on the chart early enough to have asked for help before having to submit the assignment.