Humanising data
In March 2020, I had the pleasure to give an online workshop on data visualisation as part of the AWAN (Arab Women Artists Now) Festival produced by Arts Canteen London, and funded by the Arts Council England. This one hour long workshop allowed me to simply introduce the notion of data visualisation to participants while putting forward the importance of humanising the data in our analysis and representation. In this workshop I tried to question the impersonal aspect of data and explored different alternatives and examples that effectively changed the way people perceive data, by rendering a more human approach to data.
Within the topic of humanising data, and inspired by Giorgia Lupi's "Data humanism" I focused on how to find humanistic data in unexpected contexts and use it as a creative material. I focused also on how to find alternative and more expressive ways to represent your data set other than the inefficient conventional diagrams we're all used to. Finally the workshop ended with an activity involving all participants. This simple hand drawn activity inspired by the work of Giorgia Lupi and Stephanie Posavec' s "Observe, collect, draw" book shows in practice what a more personal type of data could look like, and how we can simply extract data from our mundane day-to-day activities and use organic and tailored ways to represent it.
Activity 1/2
Activity 2/2
Activity template
Sharing our data drawings
Snapshot from the workshop: Explaining the advantages of working manually and showing an application of the hard and soft data combination.
Reference:
Lupi, G., & Posavec, S. Observe, collect, draw!.