Data to Art: Finding a different way to represent our experiences

Today, we record a large part of our lives. We take pictures, track our activities, take notes on mobile, and post on social media. In other words, more data is being generated than ever before. However, we never organize. We just record it and leave it as it is. Because of this, whenever we want to revisit our past records, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by the tremendous amount of data. Also, all this data such as photos, notes, and activity is dispersed across different places, our memories are fragmented and it’s hard to have a cohesive view of our past.

So many services such as Google Photos are attempting to solve this problem by automated categorizing. But I feel that many of those attempts look so mechanical that there’s no way to engage with it in emotional way. Remembering the past is also an emotional experience. Where is the fun in those services? With this background, I came up with the hypothesis below and tested it.

Hypothesis: A dynamic representation of personal data can make self-reflection process richer, deeper and playful than numerical and mechanical data representation

If you are curious to know the results of this hypothesis experiment, this post is for you.