Can you get to know someone through visualisations of their personal data?

In 2013, the information designers Giorgia Lupi (living in New York City) and Stefanie Posavec (living in London) began a year-long project to get to know each other through hand-drawn data-centric postcards. Each weekly postcard communicated a different aspect of their lives through data visualisation, from the frequency they checked the time of day to the number of times their significant others ‘inspired love or inspired annoyance’. A brief but enlightening summary of Giorgia and Stefanie’s experience, Dear Data illuminates the potential (and shortcomings) of data-driven communication and suggests how visualisation can imbue even the most seemingly tedious facts and figures with emotion. See all of Giorgia and Stefanie’s postcards here.