Food as data

Moritz Stefaner is a data visualizer focusing on UI design. He aims to create unique data representations to raise people’s awareness of problems and encourage them to develop solutions. In the lecture, he mentioned the concept of a hyperobject, an entity that challenges people’s traditional way of thinking. A dataset could similarly be viewed differently from not just pie charts or bar charts. For example, a heat map is not the only option to show a range of temperatures. This revolutionary mindset makes me interested in his work that reflects hyperobject.

To achieve this, he tried to make the data more tangible and experiential. One of his projects involved using food as a tool to represent data. The information was revealed through the recipe, the layout, and the flavor, which was a more effective way to understand the data. One of the dishes was a series of coffins made of chocolate with different fills inside. Each fill represented a cause of death. It humorously referred to the line, “Life is a bottle of chocolate; you never know what you get.”. I never realized that taste could reflect data. In my work, I will try to break the conventions of traditional representation and link the data to something unexpected but exciting.