How does it feel to live together with a data physicalisation of a personal, and perhaps sensitive, subject? How does such a physicalisation influence the user and their behaviour? What does it feel like to the user?

With these questions in mind, I created Peekaboo: a physicalisation of the instances that I doubt myself. Peekaboo is meant to create an overview of how often I experience moments of self-doubt or failure anxiety, something which I have been dealing with my entire live.

In order to do so, Peekaboo has 4 indicators. The biggest represents the year, the smallest the day. The indicators in between stand for the week and month. To track when I experience self-doubt, Peekaboo comes with a portable tracker, which I carry with me at all times. When I doubt myself, I simply indicate this by rotating the top-part of the tracker to the next position, upon which the indicators of the physicalisation move to their new position. At the end of each day, week, month, and year, the respective indicator moves back to its starting position.

To explore how I respond to Peekaboo and how it affects my “relation” with failure anxiety, I am currently using Peekaboo for an auto-ethnographic study.

• Concept + Design by Rosa van Koningsbruggen
• Technical Design + Execution by Tijmen Kervers