The measures I included needed to meet the following criteria: (1) somehow indicative of an interest in mind-body-earth wellness, (2) accessible via public internet, (3) present across at least 3 continents, (4) unidimensional—each measure only affects a single dimension of the index, and (5) sufficient variance among sampled population.

I realized that the presence of certain types of businesses in a location could be a great place to start and was readily available via the Google Places API. I began cataloging yoga studios, meditation, zen, and vipassana centers and other businesses devoted to mind, body, and earth wellness. I took the same approach to Facebook when I realized that its use as a community organizing platform meant it could contain a similar and complementary data vector. I indexed a similar set of activity, organization, and ad groups that related to mind, body, and earth wellness. All in all, the current dataset consists of over 30,0000 businesses and organizations.

I took my findings and created various interactive Tableau charts. Here are a few examples:

With the Tableau prototypes serving as my blueprint, I made some quick outlines of add-on features in Sketch and then proceeded to build the web application. I evaluated Angular.js, React.js, and Vue.js as possible frameworks for the application and decided to use Vue.js because of its balance of simplicity and flexibility that I felt paired well with the needs of this project.