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Pretty Good Hat

Slow, Small Data

Via this writeup in Fast Company, Dear Data is such a cool project. Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec are spending a year exchanging a postcard per week, in which they each draw a representation of a specific behavior or facet of their lives. The front side of the postcard is the drawing itself, and the back side describes how to read the visualization.

Both images by Giorgia Lupi from “Week 38: A Week of Negative Thoughts"

One of the things that really makes me love this is the intentionality and immediacy of it. I used Reporter for several months, but fell away from it; it started to feel like something that would add value someday, but in an undefined way that didn’t keep me with it. By contrast, Stefanie and Giorgia are deciding on something very particular, measuring it and then drawing it all within about a week. Unlike so much “big data” they aren’t looking for a long-term pattern or a huge number of observations. Their illustrations are colorful and capture sparks of their personality while describing whatever they chose to measure; and the differences between their drawings are a reminder of the many ways to tell a story with a common theme.