Dear Data - Softcover

Posavec, Stefanie; Lupi, Giorgia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1846149061 ISBN 13: 9781846149061

Publisher: Particular Books, 2016

Synopsis

From an award-winning project comes an inspiring, collaborative book that makes data artistic, personal - and open to all

Each week for a year, Giorgia and Stefanie sent each other a postcard describing what had happened to them during that week around a particular theme. But they didn't write it, they drew it: a week of smiling, a week of apologies, a week of desires. Presenting their fifty-two cards, along with thoughts and ideas about the data-drawing process, Dear Data hopes to inspire you to draw, slow down and make connections with other people, to see the world through a new lens, where everything and anything can be a creative starting point for play and expression.

About this title

Review

Charming ... An intimate look at the lives of two designers as told through their personal data ... Despite the vast amount of quantification, Dear Data feels almost like an anti-quantified self project. Lupi and Posavec aren't interested in calories, steps, or heart rate. Their project explores the more slippery details of daily life. This human-centric data is the reason why Dear Data doesn't read as detached self-analysis. There are insights to be found, even in the categories they chose (Liz Stinson Wired)

Dear Data paints a human portrait with data ... With each graph and information map, we get a deeper sense of the authors' personalities. What emerges from this information overload is a fascinating catalogue of the complexity of daily living. By tracking such minutiae, Lupi and Posavec, who both work in information design, reveal the patterns that inform our decisions and affect our relationships (Washington Post)

The time and the information encoded in Lupi and Posavec's postcards is not only revealing, but poignant. As well as choosing topics around items, such as the contents of their wardrobes or the number of drinks they'd had that week, the pair also scrutinised their behaviour ... Both are mind-boggling intricate. The keys to each chart are minute, cypher-like instructions, peppered with anecdotes and asides (Guardian)

Such an information-reach year could inspire others to better calculate aspects of their lives they never thought to tabulate, with the goal of seeing patterns and perhaps fine-tuning negative behavior. And better yet, illustrating our life's data by hand can allow us to slow down and invigorate our creative selves beyond the digital (Vice)

Through the process of examining their worlds in new ways, and noting emotions, sounds, and thoughts Lupi and Posavec, like the pre-telecommunication era Decker writes about, reveal a sense of space and time that we'd never considered. Through their weekly postcard exchange the two got to know each other, and themselves. The world around them was data to be collected, to be examined (Data Matters)

With each pair of postcards presented side by side, readers immediately experience Lupi and Posavec's different styles and sensibilities and witness how they influence and complement each other over the course of this year ... An utterly delightful collection of color, lines, shapes, and geometries (Publishers Weekly)

About the Author

Stefanie Posavec is a designer and artist for whom data is her favoured material. Her work has been exhibited internationally at major galleries including the Centre Pompidou (Paris), the V&A, the Design Museum, and Somerset House (London), and is held in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Previous books (co-authored with Giorgia Lupi) include Dear Data, published by Particular Books (Penguin Random House UK) and Princeton Architectural Press (USA). Their new journal Observe, Collect, Draw! is also published by Princeton.

Edition details

• Publisher: Particular Books
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1846149061
• ISBN 13: 9781846149061
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304