Dear Data
Selected weeks of my postcards, front and back (click to enlarge)
Selected exhibitions
Codez le Monde, Centre Pompidou, Paris.
Designs of the Year 2016, Design Museum, London (nomination).
Our Lives in Data, Science Museum, London.
Big Bang Data, Marina Bay Sands, Singapore.
BreraDesignDistrict at Fuorisalone, Milan.
Big Bang Data, Somerset House, London.
Measure 3, Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York.
Awards & Nominations
- Finalist for the Innovation By Design Awards 2016
- 'Most Beautiful' (the highest accolade) & Gold in 'Data Visualization Projects' category, Kantar Information is Beautiful Awards 2015.
Dear Data is a year-long, analogue data drawing project between myself and Giorgia Lupi, an information designer based in New York.
Giorgia and I decided to use the language we both spoke for work - data visualisation - in order to get to know each other better, so we came up with a project we called Dear Data: a year of sending each other hand-drawn data postcards.
Weekly moments of posting, Giorgia (left) and Stefanie (right)
Every week for a year we collected and measured a particular type of data about our lives (examples include how often we laughed, the negative feelings we felt, times we were alone, our wardrobes, books, music, and so on).
At the end of the week we used this data to make a drawing on a postcard and then dropped the postcard in an English 'postbox' (me) or an American 'mailbox' (Giorgia).
Eventually, the postcard arrived at the other person’s address with all the scuff marks of its journey over the ocean: a type of 'slow data' transmission, culminating after a year in a collection of 104 unique esoteric datasets and visualisation methods.
The 104 postcards and accompanying preliminary sketchbooks for this project are now held in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Dear Data
The project has also been published as a book by Princeton Architectural Press (US) and Penguin Books (UK).
Shown to the right is the cover I designed for the UK market alongside a selection of illustrations I drew to further illustrate my side of the project's story.
Observe, Collect, Draw!
Our soon-to-be-published book, a visual journal that teaches a general audience how to collect and draw their own personal data. This book will be published by Princeton Architectural Press in September 2018.
Community impact
A selection of photos showing the project's impact, with many people searching out data penpals, starting year-long projects of their own, and using the process to teach student from primary school to university and beyond how to collect and visualise data. Dear Data has also been featured in statistics textbooks and high school curriculum in the US.
