Graphic designer Nicholas Felton documents his everyday routines into charts and graphs. Read this interview to learn about how the ritual of designing personal Annual Reports effects his life and design projects. hmmm... can data tell stories????
Disabled—Who, Me?
10 years ago
I found it very interesting the way in which Felton tracks ordinary/everyday trends and then finds larger patterns within them. "I can imagine how counting fireflies over the summer would make a poetic record of the way the summer was spent for an individual, but if 100 or 1,000 people are doing the same thing, does it start to tell an aggregate story that speaks more to global warming or habitat loss?" I feel like once you've visualized the statistics, the patterns then jump out at you. The process, though time consuming and lengthy, will almost always hinder interesting results. "On one end of the spectrum, it’s a glorified spreadsheet application; and on the other, it’s a storytelling platform." I couldn't agree more.
ReplyDeleteThis lecture (by one of my favorite human beings on the planet right now) is about pattern recognition in complex data, and what happens when the pattern doesn't jump out at you. what does that mean? what can be learned when there are no patterns and it is a seemingly chaotic sampling.
ReplyDeleteI would recommend reading any of Gladwell's books, especially Blink.
ReplyDelete