Autobotography Intent – AshleyD
Ashley’s Personal Purchases
A blog-like website that is based around a calendar which contains my purchases for the day. Each day will contain all receipts and items purchased as well as an indication of my stress level for the day.
Description: For this project, I wanted to create something that would benefit myself and possibly give others a look into my daily life. I buy a lot of things. Usually too many things and honestly most of the things I buy, I honestly don’t need. I want to create a blog of sorts that contains a giant calendar, where a user could click on a specific day and go in and see what I bought that day. I would scan all of my receipts and add then to this calendar. They would then be displayed for the user alongside each individual image of the products. This will not only make shopping more of a hassle for me but it will make me think more in the future about making purchases.
Another aspect of this I’d like to explore is that I tend to ignore the fact that there usually is a cheaper product and I always end up buying the more expensive product because it looks nicer, with nicer packaging. The products are usually the same and there is no reason why I shouldn’t buy the cheaper product. So I’d like to also implement a way to add in a product that I bought and compare it to other products of the same kind to see if I am actually spending smartly. If I am not spending smartly then those days would become a red color as to make myself more aware of my poor spending.
I also want to color coordinate the calendar. If I spend money only on certain purchases that day then the color would reflect those purchases. For example, food purchases would be a green color and clothes would be blue. I also want to include if I was stressed that day and why I was stressed out because I usually spend more money when I am stressed. Stressed days would be marked as purple and would attempt to explain the reasons for my stress. This may give further insight into why I am spending more money as well as help me deal with my stress more accordingly.
Budget: Working two hours per day. Four days of design development and study of designs for refinement. Two weeks to develop a basic layout for the website in HTML and CSS. One week to refine and make changes to the development. Completed in roughly three weeks and four days. Website domain cost about 3-10$ per year. Use of Sublime text and Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. Based on current standards for payment in graphic design and user experience I would be paying myself about 18.00$ per hour. Totaling the project to about 900$ upon completion.
Initial Designs:
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I think that this is not only a beneficial message to others, but I am also sure it will be for yourself. It brings awareness to the weight of consumer purchasing, and what it means to have too much. It has become a venture of mine to consider the value of the thing I want to purchase over the desire for it.
That being said, I would be curious to see if you might rate each item you purchase on a scale that rates it from a need to want. It might give you an interesting metric to measure the ratio of your purchases and would force you to examine your personal values and decisions. To assist in the image recovery process, you could take the UPC number, and have a google image search pull the product for you? Not sure if that would do everything, but might help.