Dear Data

Your first visualization assignment is to create a hand-drawn visualization about data from your own life. This assignment is inspired by Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec’s book, Dear Data, so you may want to look to their work for ideas.

In the selection of the text I’ve posted, they suggest:

• see the world as a data collector
• begin with a question
• gather the data
• spend time with data
• organize and categorize
• find the main story
• visual inspiration to build your personal vocabulary
• sketch and experiment with first ideas
• draw the final picture
• draw the legend

I don’t care what you pick as your question, as long as it interests you. Some ideas from Dear Data include:

• clocks
• thank you
• mirrors
• complaints
• phone addiction
• to-do lists
• emotions
• people
• schedules
• compliments
• drinks
• doors
• positive thoughts
• envy
• urban wildlife
• negative thoughts
• music
• laughter
• books

I would like you to collect data for a week, so you should start thinking about your question over the weekend, and perhaps start collecting data next week. I’d prefer you to visualize something that is not automatically tracked by your phone, but I won’t be too picky.

For this assignment, I am requiring two deliverables:

• a finished visualization, complete with handwritten legend
• an accompanying description of the visualization, including
  • the question you decided to answer
  • the first few ideas you came up with when brainstorming
  • why you chose your final visualization method
  • a description of the variables you visualized, and the visual mappings (e.g., “I chose to map the number of steps I took in a day to color, with red meaning very few steps (less than 1,000), orange meaning a middling number (1,001-5,000), yellow meaning I did alright but didn’t hit my goal (5,001-9,999) and green meaning I hit my goal or surpassed it (10,000+).”)

These deliverables can be handed in to me physically in class on 2/26, or scanned and uploaded to Canvas by the same date.