Stefanie Posavec had quite a week. She said “fuck” 66 times, “asshole” 12 times and let rip with “shit” on no fewer than 13 occasions. Not that I was counting. She was. And what’s more, she plotted it on a postcard for all the world to see.
Part of a project called Dear Data, the postcard is one of 104 sent between Posavec and fellow designer Giorgia Lupi over the course of a year, each mailing one a week. The aim, they tell me, was to explore whether it was possible to get to know someone through data alone.
“We didn’t know each other; before starting Dear Data we only met twice,” says Lupi. While the pair were aware of each other’s professional work, it was a chance meeting at a data and media art festival in Minneapolis in 2013 that threw them together. And it turned out that Lupi, an Italian living in New York, and Posavec, an American living in London, had plenty in common, besides their love of hand-crafted, information-based design. “We both switched continents, we are the same age [35] and we are both only children who have travelled far away from our families,” says Lupi.
The upshot, after a second meeting the following year, was an experiment: could they get to know each other by number-crunching their lives, one topic per week, with only a handful of coloured pens to bring their data to life?
“Both the data collection and the way we decided to display the data reveal something about our personalities,” says Lupi, adding that the data collection was largely made by quick jottings on paper or smartphone, with the exception of one week, in which the pair used an app to track their movements. “[Using the app], it felt like we weren’t really in control of our data, and that we weren’t really engaging with it, so after that point we said, ‘Let’s focus on data that an app can’t gather yet,’” says Posavec.
Their obsession with collecting information seems almost de rigueur. The boom of big data, and the technology that makes its collection and analysis possible, has brought with it a global fascination with tracking every step, snooze and calorie. More broadly, every newspaper, advertising agency and campaign group appears to have embraced the trend for sleek graphics and ingenious visuals, while no app would be complete without a thumbnail chart to scrutinise.
So it seems surprising that Lupi and Posavec have thumbed their noses at such digital sophistication. The data collection, they admit, was sometimes imperfect. It’s depiction – using a ruler, pens and pencils – is amusing, even innocent.
But, says Posavec, it has a point. It takes hours to make each postcard, hours that invite reflection. “It helps us better understand and be closer to the subject matter that we are dealing with.”
A look at the postcards, now collected in a book, also named Dear Data, and there’s no mistaking Lupi and Posavec’s different styles. While each week the pair agreed on a topic, ranging from the wildlife they had spotted to the scents they had noticed, the data they gathered and their colourful depictions of it are vastly different.
Lupi’s postcards are almost forensic: swaths of data encoded in painstakingly hand-drawn devices. In week 32 of the project, she charted the different noises she heard, each sound represented by a note bearing a different symbol, drawn on a colour-coded stave corresponding to where it was heard, with the length of each note relating to the prevalence of the sound. Posavec, by contrast, favours a looser, more intuitive approach – her postcard for week 32 boasts brightly coloured rectangles stacked up to chart the sounds she heard against the time of day in which she heard them.
Both are mind-boggling intricate. The keys to each chart are minute, cypher-like instructions, peppered with anecdotes and asides. “Sorry mom and dad! Your daughter swears like a sailor,” Posavec scribbled on the back of week 37, the week of the bad-language count, next to a colour-coded chart indicating whether each curse was in jest or not and exactly what had provoked it.
“It takes time, both to crack a postcard like that and also to read a postcard like that, but I like to say that it was our way of spending time together,” says Lupi. The postcards themselves, she adds, not only reveal something about the other person, but also foster a more conventional approach to friendship. “We would look at each other’s postcards and then message the other person with questions about the data,” adds Posavec “The entire year functions like a self-portrait of each of us, but it is a starting point to know more about each other.”
Not that the project was without its challenges.
“It really forced both of us to invent new visual models and to extend ourselves as designers,” says Lupi, confessing that on one occasion she spent seven hours creating her postcard for the week, drawing more than 700 tiny rectangles depicting the doors she’d opened that week.
Posavec agrees. “A lot of information is meant to be crammed in there, it’s meant to be really rich,” she says.
Dedicate 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. Week 38 threw the spotlight on negative thoughts.
“[That] was really challenging for me, because a lot of time I would feel a negative thought, something that wasn’t quite OK, coming through my mind, but I wasn’t really able to grasp it and to categorise it right away. Was it fear? Was it anxiety? Was it sadness?” asks Lupi. “It really helped me spending a little time with these negative thoughts.”
It was a week that also hit home for Posavec. “I realised I had more negative thoughts about myself than about anything else,” she says. “Because, gathering data, you need to be as honest as possible – it forces you to look at the data and confront that as part of yourself.”
Other weeks were rather more experimental. “We started to gather data on something in order to force us to change our behaviour,” says Posavec. The challenge? See how many times you can smile at strangers. “I really hated that week – I hate smiling at people in London,” she admits.
She’s not kidding. Looking up her postcard, I discover the last day of the week is shaded out. The key tells all. “Stopped smiling in protest to assholes!” it says. “I kind of went on strike,” Posavec admits. But, she says, the experience was formative, too. “[Following the experiment] I do actually try to smile more at people that I interact with.”
But is there not a hitch? Gathering, displaying and exchanging all this data may be fascinating, but releasing it in exhibitions and, now, a book seems a breach of everyday privacy. Did the pair have any qualms?
Posavec says not. “I thought as long as I am OK and I give permission for people to look at my data, then that is fine.”
Lupi, too, is relaxed about the idea. “We have never been scared of sharing with the other person – or with the world – our flaws, our obsessions, our bad habits in the form of data,” she says, adding that revealing such matters not only helps when it comes to tackling those habits, but also helps others to relate to the work. “There is nothing shameful in admitting that I’m envious of native English speakers, or of people who are more charming than I am, or that I have negative thoughts about the fact that I feel I’m not enough – that is something that is part of me and it is good to put it out in the world,” she says.
While the year of Dear Data is over, its impact, says Lupi, is lasting. “I feel so much more aware of what’s happening around me,” she says. “I like to say that data collection can be a form of meditation.”
Posavec hopes the project will also have a wider impact on the way we all view data. “Data doesn’t need to be intimidating – there can be a human side to it,” she says. “You don’t need a fancy programme to work with it – you just need a pencil.”
But the question remains, did the two become closer from sharing data?
“I would say we are really close friends,” says Posavec. “I talk about things with her that I don’t talk about with a lot of friends.”
She says the project has not only brought them closer but enabled them to examine each other’s lives in new ways.
“I feel really lucky. I feel like we both talk a lot about our lives and then also explore things to understand them from a different perspective. Through design and then designing with data.”
Dear Data by Stefanie Posavec and Giorgia Lupi is published by Penguin (£20). Click here to order a copy for £16.40
