Data Visualization | Day 1
This session was on 5th Feb 2021
The session began with some talk about data in general, and then sir introduced the book ‘The Medium is the Massage’ by Marshall McLuhan. After doing some online research, I got to know that the title is a play on McLuhan’s often-quoted phrase “The medium is the message.” The author adopted the term “massage” to denote the effect of numerous media in how they ‘massage’ the human perception.
We read through parts of the book, and the content felt quite weird but truthful. Although it was a 1960s’ book, many things it said were surprisingly relevant today. It made me wonder how one could predict the future so well, and even made me doubt if the author’s work was just a fluke.
We then watched a TED talk by Hasan Elahi, an artist, on how he tackled a problem he happened to have with the FBI in a very creative way. He was mistakenly inspected at the Detroit airport once, and since then, the FBI had been tracking him. He decided that he would put out his data himself, instead of the FBI sneaking up on him, so as to have more control. He made this activity into a project, and has collected tons of everyday pictures of his surroundings and belongings on his website.
We looked at ‘Joyve’, a chair game controller designed by Priyanka Borar. Basically you can control the movements on screen by moving with the chair. Honestly, I didn’t like the concept much, because the gameplay seems to be really slow, and the project description says that it will help to keep people healthy. I don’t think minor movements like these would be really effective in making people healthy. Nevertheless, I found the technological aspect of this project to be interesting. Converting physical data into game movements is a thing I would like to do in the future.
Last, but not the least, we were introduced to the book ‘Dear Data’ by Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec. Basically, this book showed postcards that these two women sent each other through mail for a year, which contained data visualized from their everyday lives. The data sets were not anything important or groundbreaking, but rather trivial data. Nevertheless, the visualizations were really beautiful. This made me of how a lotus blooms in mud, beautiful visualizations can also emerge from rather unimportant data.
