We humans constantly generate data, and it’s constantly being tracked for us. Every step we take, every item we purchase, every website we visit snowballs into a mountain of information -- it’s no coincidence that it’s called Big Data. Data drives many of our decisions today: for example, Amazon suggests what we should put into our shopping carts based on its analysis of our buying history and the history of people with similar tastes; Netflix deploys proprietary formulas to steer us to movie and TV choices so we keep bingeing. Data can also be a great source of anxiety -- we worry about our personal information being stolen or used against us. But what if we could take ownership of our day-to-day data and use it to tell our own story instead?
That’s what Giorgia Lupi, co-founder and design director at Accurat, a New York City- and Milan-based firm, is trying to do (TED Talk: How we can find ourselves in data). She looks at data from a perspective she calls “data humanism” that emphasizes its vitality and color. It’s time, she says, “to begin designing ways to connect numbers to what they really stand for: knowledge, behaviors, people.” She urges to think beyond the hackneyed forms of data visualization -- the bar graphs, the linear timelines -- and dream up other ways to turn statistics into a story. A data portrait can be a great way to begin reclaiming and recycling your personal information. And there’s no right or wrong way to do it; it’s like a selfie, but made out of data points rather than pixels.
Here’s a template you can use to start taking your data in your own hands. The process is straightforward: just answer these questions, then draw. And don’t worry, it's meant for artists andnon-artists.
