Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec’s Life Data Visualizations

As we remain distanced, with a pandemic raging and craving physical connections, it is hard to tell one day from the next, let alone understand what we’re feeling and seeing. Let’s take a cue from this week’s Artist Project: collecting and drawing data can be a powerful tool to center ourselves, deal with daily anxiety, and practice empathy and gratitude.

In 2014, after meeting at a conference in Minneapolis, and feeling the beginning of a great friendship, information designers Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec decided to get to know each other via their favorite language: data. Each week for one year, Lupi and Posavec gathered information focusing on aspects of their lives—from the books in their homes and their to-do lists, to the complaints they’d voiced during the past seven days and the smells they’d encountered. They each rendered the data they had gathered that week in a visualization hand-drawn on a postcard that would travel all the way to the other side of the Atlantic—Lupi sending from New York and Posavec from London. On the front of the postcard there would be a representation of the data, and on the other, a detailed explanation of how to read the visualization: the legend or code needed to understand the drawing. The resulting 104 postcards are the record of a budding, now rock-solid friendship. They are also a surprising window onto the field of data visualization—normally considered impersonal, functional, and exquisitely digital, and here instead rendered emotionally expressive, gestural, and intimate. Giorgia Lupi explained this take on information design in her 2017 manifesto “Data Humanism.” In 2016, MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design acquired this project, now titled Dear Data (2015).

Together with Lupi and Posavec, we have selected five topics from five weeks of Dear Data that are relevant in our current predicament. The designers have drafted prompts for each one so that we can all join in. For the first time since the end of the project, they have also reunited to create two additional postcards around a timely topic: lockdown connections. From April 18 to April 24, they recorded their interactions with friends, family, neighbors, and friendly strangers and illustrated them in a set of visualizations that show the different life lines that we create, even when we are physically far away. We hope that you will feel inspired by at least one of these exercises to create your own!

Need some help? Here’s how you normally go about data collection and drawing:

Begin with a big question. What do you want to know and explore? Then enrich the data by asking additional, smaller, contextual questions.

Gather the data. Collect your data however you choose, all the while being immediate, truthful, and consistent in your data gathering.

Spend time with your data. Before drawing, analyze your data to search for patterns and understand it at a deeper level.

Organize and categorize. Simplify your data by grouping it into larger categories based on what will best communicate your story.

Find the main focus. Starting with the patterns discovered in your data, decide your main story focus: this helps decide the layout of a data-drawing.

Get visually inspired. Use the aesthetic qualities of images you are attracted to as visual inspiration for the drawing.

Draw! Sketch and draft ideas, then draw the final picture.

Draw the legend. Make sure that every design element that represents data is listed so the reader understands what everything means.

Show us your work on social media with the hashtag #deardata!