Mimi Jiao – Looking Outwards 7 – Section E

Nicholas Feltron is a designer and artist whose work centers around exploring different ways of information visualization and translating data into meaningful and digestible experiences. He is widely known for his multi year project, the personal annual reports. In this personal annual reports, he summarizes his yearly activities in a series of graphic representations. These statistics track his living habits such as amount of time spent sleeping, working, relaxing, etc. as well as information about the external environment such as weather. I found out about him last year through my design professors and I was really interested in how he used Processing to map out his information in a visually interesting way. Since he collects a ton of information everyday, he uses coding to filter out unnecessary data and find patterns within the data. I really enjoy the layout and visual elements of his annual reports; they are very readable and easy to understand. It’s interesting seeing him map out his own behaviors as well as the environment’s behaviors through bar graphs, population density clusters, and other information visualization techniques. In addition, it is also really easy for viewers to jump to specific sections of his report since there is an overwhelming amount of information throughout the entire report. His use of colors unify his report and adds emphasis to the information he wants to highlight. All in all, Feltron’s annual reports demonstrate the effectiveness of creative coding while maintaining good design conventions for optimal information digestion. As a piece of design, I think it is very interesting and effective, however, his reports don’t really explore the aesthetics of information visualization as much. There are probably much more interesting and fun ways of visualizing the data in his annual report. But, I really enjoy this for the content of the work rather than the aesthetics, and I think it is really interesting seeing someone’s life represented through numbers, graphs, and text.