Dear Data

Check out Giorgia and Stefanie's excellent talks at Eyeo for more detail on their attitudes and ideas.

https://vimeo.com/70666303 https://vimeo.com/109954123

https://vimeo.com/46304381 https://vimeo.com/72246588

I am not a data viz designer, but I've read VDoQI and I enjoy following the field as a lay person. I build a lot of charts but I don't design them. A lot of my clients have philistine data viz taste--and many of their graphic designers too, even the ones whose graphic design taste is good. By Tufte's criterion of information density, their ideas are a total failure: streetlights, speedometer-like gauges, etc. But often they just don't have that many numbers to show, or the numbers have few dimensions. Maybe in that case Tufte would recommend a plain old table, but that isn't always helpful for "at a glance" reading, especially if there is a lot of non-numeric data too. I'm starting to think that Tufte is really excellent inspiration when you have a "hard" data viz problem, but he might lead you astray when you have an easy one. His crusade against chart junk is probably relevant any time though. :-) Anyway, I'm usually just the implementer, so I'm curious what real professionals thing about all that.

I see far more similarities between Tufte and Lupi's work than differences (and works/talks by both of them are among the biggest influences on my approach to visualization and things I want to work on).

Both have as driving principles that people are curious and intelligent, and that visualizations should cater to that. Tufte certainly preaches "avoid unnecessary ornamentation". But he also preaches "show the data". In particular, showing individual data points, rather than aggregations, and that the purpose of a visualization is as much to provoke questions as to answer them.

Totally agree with the PO box idea. This project somewhat reminds me of http://www.onemilliongiraffes.com/

I understand this is personal between two friends, but if there were a PO Box, thousands of people can participate and it would be a lot of fun

There are kids that wear button-up shirts and carry briefcases to class??

...I think we went to very different schools...

That having been said, this could make for a really interesting and thought-provoking pen-pal-type program. In particular, the visualizations relating to personal interactions or how time is spent could really highlight cultural differences that we're usually oblivious to.