Dear Data

Last updated
Dear Data
Dear Data.jpg
First edition
Author Stefanie Posavec, Giorgia Lupi
LanguageEnglish
Subject Information design
ISBN 978-1-84614-906-1 (Flexibound)

Dear Data is a collection of postcards containing data recorded from the everyday lives of information designers Stefanie Posavec and Giorgia Lupi. The book was published in the United Kingdom by Penguin Press on September 1, 2016 [1] and in North America by Princeton Architectural Press on September 6, 2016. [2]

Prior to this year-long collaboration, the co-authors had only met twice. [3] The premise of this project was to test firsthand how well one could get to know someone through reading their data. Postcards were exchanged between them on a weekly basis with the data being represented through a drawing on one side and a detailed key or legend on the other. A few of the topics include: A Week of Negative Thoughts, A Week of A Workspace, and A Week of New Things. [4] The project has surface similarities with the quantified self projects like designer Nicholas Felton's annual reports that quantify and represent life events like number of books read or place visited, but is more personal and less analytical, with hand-drawn illustrations replacing computer generated charts. [5] [6] It "paints a human portrait with data." [7] Dear data is also, in a way, the opposite of Big Data, it is composed of representations little data about on the minutiae of individuals' lives.

The original post cards as well as several accompanying notebooks are now part of the permanent collection at the MoMa. [8] [9]

Reception

Dear Data won two 2015 Information is Beautiful Awards, the Most Beautiful Award as well as Gold in the Dataviz Project category. [8] It was also a finalist for the Innovation By Design Awards 2016 and nominated for the Design Museum Beazley Designs of the Year 2016. [10] While the book was not widely reviewed, reviewers were generally positive. [11] [7] [3] [12] Wired called the book "charming", saying it is "filled with hand drawn postcards and full-page spreads with insights about how it feels to keep a microscope on your life for an entire year." [5] It averages over four (out of five) stars in its more than seven hundred reviews on the social reading site Goodreads. [13]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising</span> Fashion school in Los Angeles, California

The Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising (FIDM) is a private college in downtown Los Angeles.

A content designer is tasked with communicating information in the best way possible. An effective content designer is expected to be skilled in language(s), graphic design, and the technical requirements of front-end development. A content designer is an expert across various media, and is skilled in drafting compelling text, images, and videos.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pentagram (design firm)</span> International design studio

Pentagram is a design firm. It was founded in 1972, by Alan Fletcher, Theo Crosby, Colin Forbes, Kenneth Grange, and Mervyn Kurlansky at Needham Road, Notting Hill, London. The company has offices in London, New York City, San Francisco, Berlin and Austin, Texas. In addition to its influential work, the firm is known for its unusual structure, in which a hierarchically flat group of partners own and manage the firm, often working collaboratively, and share in profits and decisionmaking.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tim Gunn</span> American author, academic, and television personality

Timothy MacKenzie Gunn is an American author, academic, and television personality. He served on the faculty of Parsons School of Design from 1982 to 2007 and was chair of fashion design at the school from August 2000 to March 2007, after which he joined Liz Claiborne as its chief creative officer. Over 16 seasons, Gunn has become well known as the on-air mentor to designers on the reality television program Project Runway. Gunn's popularity on Project Runway led to two spin-off shows; Bravo's Tim Gunn's Guide to Style and Lifetime's Under the Gunn, as well as five books. In addition to being an executive producer, Gunn has served as mentor for the teen designers on Project Runway: Junior. He also provides the voice of Baileywick, the castle steward in the Disney Junior television show Sofia the First and narrated the sitcom Mixology.

Goodreads is an American social cataloging website and a subsidiary of Amazon that allows individuals to search its database of books, annotations, quotes, and reviews. Users can sign up and register books to generate library catalogs and reading lists. They can also create their own groups of book suggestions, surveys, polls, blogs, and discussions. The website's offices are located in San Francisco.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stefanie Scott</span> American actress and singer

Stefanie Noelle Scott is an American actress and singer. Scott began acting with the comedy film Beethoven's Big Break (2008), and thereafter released her debut extended play New Girl in Town (2009). This was followed by a supporting role in the romance film Flipped (2010), which won her a Young Artist Award. She played the role of Lexi Reed on Disney Channel's A.N.T. Farm (2011–2014), which won her a second Young Artist Award and introduced her to a wider audience. While on Disney, she recorded a number of Disney Channel promotional singles, which were released between 2008 and 2012.

Sujata Keshavan is an Indian graphic designer. She is a co-founder of Ray and Keshavan, a brand design firm based in India.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Quantified self</span> Movement of people who track themselves with body-related data

Quantified self refers both to the cultural phenomenon of self-tracking with technology and to a community of users and makers of self-tracking tools who share an interest in "self-knowledge through numbers". Quantified self practices overlap with the practice of lifelogging and other trends that incorporate technology and data acquisition into daily life, often with the goal of improving physical, mental, and emotional performance. The widespread adoption in recent years of wearable fitness and sleep trackers such as the Fitbit or the Apple Watch, combined with the increased presence of Internet of things in healthcare and in exercise equipment, have made self-tracking accessible to a large segment of the population.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Neri Oxman</span> US-based Israeli architect, designer, scientist

Neri Oxman is an American–Israeli designer and professor known for art and architecture that combines design, biology, computing, and materials engineering. She coined the phrase "material ecology" to define her work.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dave Hakkens</span> Dutch industrial designer (born 1988).

Dave Hakkens is a Dutch industrial designer. He gained fame with his two graduation projects: Phonebloks, a concept for modular telephones, and Precious Plastic, a movement to develop and promote machines and organizations for plastic recycling. Hakkens is seen by many as an example of a new generation of designers who have set themselves the goal of improving society by sharing knowledge.

Sidewalk Labs LLC is an urban planning and infrastructure subsidiary of Google. Its stated goal is to improve urban infrastructure through technological solutions, and tackle issues such as cost of living, efficient transportation and energy usage. The company was headed by Daniel L. Doctoroff, former Deputy Mayor of New York City for economic development and former chief executive of Bloomberg L.P. until 2021. Other notable employees include Craig Nevill-Manning, co-founder of Google's New York office and inventor of Froogle, and Rohit Aggarwala, who served as chief policy officer of the company and is now Commissioner of New York City Department of Environmental Protection. It was originally part of Alphabet Inc., Google's parent company, before being absorbed into Google in 2021 following Doctoroff's departure from the company due to a suspected ALS diagnosis.

Ravi Naidoo is the founder of Interactive Africa and Design Indaba, an annual three day design conference hosted in Cape Town, South Africa, as well as a suite of events such as Design Commons and antenna. Naidoo is also a co-founder of the Cape Innovation and Tech Initiative (CiTi) and Rain, Africa's first 5G network.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Giorgia Lupi</span> Italian information designer

Giorgia Lupi is an Italian information designer, a partner at design firm Pentagram, and co-founder of research and design firm Accurat. She is a co-author of Dear Data, a collection of hand drawn data visualizations, along with information designer Stefanie Posavec. Her work is also part of the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art.

Stefanie Posavec is a London-based information designer whose work focuses on non-traditional representations of data, born in 1981. She co-authored the 2016 book Dear Data with Giorgia Lupi.

<i>Florence</i> (video game) 2018 interactive story and video game

Florence is an interactive story and video game developed by the Australian studio Mountains and published by Annapurna Interactive. The game was released on February 14, 2018 for iOS, on March 14, 2018 for Android, and for macOS, Nintendo Switch, and Windows on February 13, 2020.

Natsai Audrey Chieza is a designer and the founder of Faber Futures, a R&D studio that creates biologically inspired materials. She gave a 2017 TED talk on fashion's problem with pollution. She is Designer in Residence at Ginkgo Bioworks.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mauro Martino</span> Italian artist, designer and researcher

Mauro Martino is an Italian artist, designer and researcher. He is the founder and director of the Visual Artificial Intelligence Lab at IBM Research, and Professor of Practice at Northeastern University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eyeo festival</span>

The Eyeo Festival is a yearly conference for artists who work with data and code. It takes place in Minneapolis. The conference began in 2011, and has taken place yearly since then, typically at the Walker Art Center. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the event was put on pause for 2020 and 2021. Eyeo returned to Minneapolis in 2022, but was later put back on hiatus for 2023. There have been no updates on if/when Eyeo will be return.

Maxwell Mutanda is a Zimbabwean artist, designer, design researcher, and cofounder of the design firm Studio [D] Tale, based out of London, Harare, and Cape Town, South Africa. Mutanda uses collage and architectural practice to make sustainable participatory design.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Thabo Makhetha-Kwinana</span> South African fashion designer (born 1987)

Thabo Makhetha-Kwinana is a fashion designer known for her designs which fuse African and Western styles, with a focus on Basotho culture

References

  1. "Dear Data". Penguin Press. Archived from the original on 3 April 2020. Retrieved 2 April 2020.
  2. "Dear Data". Princeton Architectural Press. Archived from the original on 30 March 2019. Retrieved 2 April 2020.
  3. 1 2 Davis, Nicola (21 August 2016). "Can you get to know a person through data alone?". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 13 April 2019. Retrieved 2 April 2020.
  4. Davis, Nicola (2016-08-21). "Can you get to know a person through data alone?". the Guardian. Retrieved 2018-03-10.
  5. 1 2 Stinson, Liz (1 September 2016). "Here's What Happens When Two Designers Speak Only in Infographics". Wired. Archived from the original on 13 February 2019. Retrieved 2 April 2020.
  6. Sorapure, Madeleine (2019). "Getting Personal: Teaching Personal Writing in the Digital Age". Biography. 42 (2): 404. doi:10.1353/bio.2019.0040. S2CID   203381733 via Gale Literature Resource Center.
  7. 1 2 Silverberg, David (11 September 2016). "'Dear Data': a portrait of the data points that create a life". Seattle Times. Archived from the original on 1 February 2018. Retrieved 2 April 2020.
  8. 1 2 "2015 winners Dear Data featured in MOMA's permanent collection — Information is Beautiful Awards". www.informationisbeautifulawards.com. Retrieved 2018-03-10.
  9. "Giorgia Lupi, Stefanie Posavec: Dear Data". MoMA. 2015. Archived from the original on 18 December 2019. Retrieved 2 April 2020.
  10. "Giorgia Lupi | Design Indaba". Design Indaba. Retrieved 2018-03-10.
  11. "Nonfiction Reviews: Dear Data". Publishers Weekly. 263 (28). 11 July 2016. ProQuest   1803832949.
  12. Hess, Liam (28 September 2016). "Dear Data: The designers who turned daily habits into art". Culture. Archived from the original on 19 January 2019. Retrieved 2 April 2020.
  13. "Dear Data". Goodreads. Retrieved 2 April 2020.