“Dear Data” Reflection

Georgia Lupi is an Italian native working in New York City as a private information designer. Although her background is in architecture, her interest lies in data and how it can be used to understand human relationships. Combining her design background with her love of data, Lupi started a company in Milan, Italy that creates “design solutions to get people closer to data” through graphical creations. In 2013 Lupi met Stefanie Posavek, another player in the relatively small discipline of information design from London at the annual EYEO Festival. The EYEO Festival is a cross-disciplinary celebration of technological innovation at the hands of artists, coders, data designers, researchers and beyond (eyeofestival.com). While Lupi had expressed that although there is value in hand drawing, her company works 100% digitally, Posavek discussed her keen interest in hand drawing and creating three-dimensionally. At the 2014 festival, the two met for the second time and decided to collaborate on a project they named `Dear Data ” in which they agreed to get to know each other through data data driven post cards that they would design and send each week. These postcards crossed the disciplines of design and data and tackled subjects from movement, to love, to drinking habits, and personal strengths and weaknesses. In 2015, the duo came back to the EYEO Festival, this time as keynote speakers discussing their experiences with the project. Although the speech was a long, 50 minutes, each new subject the women discussed surprising peaked my interest and inspired me for the future of my data design.

The first thing that grabbed my attention in their talk was the learning curve that came at the beginning of the project and even pursued long into it. They discuss how in the first week they thought they were going to take data solely by hand in small notebooks as they traveled through the day. Quickly, they realized that this was chaotic and unsustainable for their lifestyles and decided to incorporate the use of technology by keeping data in their iphone notes and in various apps. The next week’s topic was movement throughout the city for which the women used an external app to automatically collect data. This was the first and last time they used an external data collector as they both agreed it felt impersonal. In the following week the women decided to collect data on their “thankyous” however this week also brought up its own problems. Because they knew they were trying to collect data, it made them more conscious about when they used thank you and made them think more about saying it before they actually did. This was a problem because the data may not have reflected their actual, subconscious habits of saying thank you. As a student studying information design, seeing these professionals still working out kinks as they try a new project reassures me that the value and success of a project lies not only in the final product but in the process and through some failure. Going forward after hearing these women, I have the mindset that it is more valuable to try new things and potentially fail than to stay in my comfort zone and create uninteresting or thought provoking projects. 

Something else I was very intrigued by is the way that the two women created such different postcards even given the same general topic. Through the collection of postcards after maintaining the project for forty weeks, it was clear that Posavek was much more colorful and radial while Lupi was much more technical, detailed and complex drawing on her architectural roots. This is one example of how much these women were able to learn about themselves and each other throughout this process. They talk about how their Dear Data project made them much more observant and aware of themselves, their habits and also their surroundings. At one point Lupi said that through data, she had learned more about Posavek, whom she’d only met in person twice, than she did about some of her closest friends. In concluding how this project had changed them and their relationships, Lupi said that data can be “humas, delicate, slow and worm.” Kosavek added that data is not the end of the story, rather it is the beginning. By this I think she means that data should be a point of departure for further thought about something. For examples in this project specifically, the results of their data collection about their bad habits is not simply a set of observations it is a way for them to really self reflect and see how they can work to better themselves. Seeing data as such a human concept rather than solely scientific and mathematic as a first time information designer makes the task seem much less daunting. 

There was one moment in the speech that particularly got me thinking and left me with questions. The women talk about the occasional data voids in which they were preoccupied in either good or bad ways and forgot to record data. But in the weeks where their research revolved around their personal habits, does the so called “data void” actually become data in and of itself? In my opinion the lack of data collected (with an explanation as to why) can say just as much about a person as actively recorded data can. What are your thoughts on this?