Dear Data

Dear Data is a long-term project that involves hand-drawn data postcards sent every week for a whole year by Giorgia Lupi, based in New York, and her collaborator Stefanie Posavec, who was located in London. During this fifty-two week collaboration, they collected personal data around a certain topic in order to investigate and share information in an analogous and more personal way than we are used to in our fast-paced world. Each week they collected data on activities or thoughts before translating the information into hand-drawn visualisations. Their weekly surveys included topics such as why and how often they checked the time, and when and how their partners sparked love and/or annoyance; they even drew detailed descriptions of all the doors they passed in a week. Lupi and Posavec conceived their laborious project as a “personal documentary” rather than a quantified-self project. Rather than using data to become more efficient, they used data to connect with themselves and others at a deeper level. The project has evolved into a three hundred–page book and into another project, in which Lupi and Posavec encourage everyone to exchange their own data postcards with data pen pals.