Information Design at UCD

Dear Data style

I teach a large Level 1 class on Information Design, offered by the School of Information and Communication Studies at University College Dublin, aka UCD. The class has nearly 300 students, from many different schools and disciplines at the university. While some of these students are coming from Arts degrees, no student in the class is from any visual arts discipline, to the best of my knowledge.

As part of the assessment for this class the students were required to submit three Graphic Journals each, Dear Data style. For this, they needed to record data about some aspect of their lives for a period of 5 days to two week, and visualise it using pen and papers, Dear Data style.

Dear Data is an award winninng project and a 300-page hand drawn data book by Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec published by Penguin Books and Princeton Arch Press. Dear Data is exhibited at Somerset Houseand London’s Science Museum, winning ‘Most Beautiful’ award (the highest accolade) at the Information is Beautiful Awards 2015, amongst many other awards and nominations.

This great work was later acquired by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) as part of their permanent collection and will live in the archives and catalogue of one of the world’s most prestigious institution.

The plan for this Information Design assignment at UCD was to have a final selection of the best of the best, and to present them on a permanent exhibition at the School of Information and Communication Studies at UCD, in the Newman building.

The result of this work ended up being very interesting. We received over 700 submissions from students, and the submissions surprised me big time.

After the first round of submission, when students started tweeting their Graphic journal submissions using the class hashtag #InfoDesignUCD and #DearData hashtag, we received messages and likes from the awesome Dear Data. This was very inspiring for the students. Later the awesome Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec, the Dear Data authors/information designers, very kindly offered to sit at the final selection panel with me to choose our best of the best work for our exhibition at UCD Newman building.

Here I am sharing with the world a shortlist of our 30 best, out of over 700 submissions. Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec will make the final selection out of these 30. The final selection will be be displayed on a permanent exhibition on the walls of Newman building at UCD. In other word they will be the art work in this monumental building!

I would like to give a loud thank you and well done to IS10030 students. Shortlisting the best 30 wasn’t an easy task as there were so many good data art pieces. Great work guys!

I would also like to thank Giorgia and Stefanie from Dear Data for their support and encouragements.

Enjoy this great collection…

You can click on each work to zoom in.