AUTHOR: Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec
STARTED: May 10, 2017
FINISHED: May 28, 2017
PAGES: 291
GENRE: Non-fiction
FIRST SENTENCE: [From the Foreward] "My experience is what I agree to attend to," William James wrote at the dawn of modern psycholog.
SUMMARY: [From BN] Equal parts mail art, data visualization, and affectionate correspondence, Dear Data celebrates "the infinitesimal, incomplete, imperfect, yet exquisitely human details of life," in the words of Maria Popova (Brain Pickings), who introduces this charming and graphically powerful book. For one year, Giorgia Lupi, an Italian living in New York, and Stefanie Posavec, an American in London, mapped the particulars of their daily lives as a series of hand-drawn postcards they exchanged via mail weekly—small portraits as full of emotion as they are data, both mundane and magical. Dear Data reproduces in pinpoint detail the full year's set of cards, front and back, providing a remarkable portrait of two artists connected by their attention to the details of their lives—including complaints, distractions, phone addictions, physical contact, and desires. These details illuminate the lives of two remarkable young women and also inspire us to map our own lives, including specific suggestions on what data to draw and how. A captivating and unique book for designers, artists, correspondents, friends, and lovers everywhere.
THOUGHTS: The authors of this book were on NPR some time ago and I really liked the idea of this project. I added the book to my TBR list and I just now got around to reading it. What I thought would be a quick, two-hour read turned into a much deeper and far more interesting book. Sure this work is mainly pictures, but if you take the time to read and try to analyze the data it becomes a much better book. You could just flip through the postcards, but it's far more interesting to the explanations the author gives for how the authors are illustrating their data collections. I also loved that each page included some additional insights the authors discovered about themselves.
RATING: 7/10 [Very Good]
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