Climate change postcards from every country

The effects of climate change can be seen around the world, in the present. The New York Times uses a mix of maps, charts, videos, illustrations, and photographs to imagine postcards sent from every country in the world to show what’s happening.

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Send postcards of plots made in R

How many times have you made a plot in R and thought, “I wish I could send this as a postcard to my best friend.” Probably a million times, right? Wish no more. The ggirl package (that’s gg-in real life for short) by Jacqueline Nolis lets you send a plot over the internets to a postcard API, which sends a physical card to an address you specify.

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Hand-drawn how-to instructions using zero words

Inspired by Dear Data, the data drawing pen pal project, designers Josefina Bravo, Sol Kawage, and Tomoko Furukawa use the postcard medium to send each other weekly how-to instructions for a wide variety of everyday things. The only rule is that they can’t use words.

As of writing this, they’re on week 37, which covered how to roll maki, how to eat an apple like a boss, and how to make mayonnaise.

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Dear Data, the book

Dear Data book

For a year, Stefanie Posavec and Giorgia Lupi drew data postcards and sent them to each other once a week between New York and London. Each postcard was based on data each collected during the week about their daily lives. The project is called Dear Data. Now it’s a book.

Amazon link. Get the paperback version.

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Dear Data, the book

Dear Data book

For a year, Stefanie Posavec and Giorgia Lupi drew data postcards and sent them to each other once a week between New York and London. Each postcard was based on data each collected during the week about their daily lives. The project is called Dear Data. Now it’s a book.

Amazon link. Get the paperback version.

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Data drawing pen pals

Dear Data

Stefanie Posavec, known around these parts for her manual data design and Giorgia Lupi, known for constantly drawing and searching for complexity, are sending each other data postcards once a week for a year. They call the data-drawing project Dear Data.

Each currently lives outside her home country — Posavec in London and Lupi in New York — and each week they collect data about daily life. Then instead of writing about it, they visualize their data through manual drawings on postcards and send the results to the other.

By creating and sending the data visualizations using analogue instead of digital means, we are really just doing what artists have done for ages, which is sketch and try to capture the essence of the life happening around them. However, as we are sketching life in the modern digital age, life also includes everything that is counted, computed, and measured.

We are trying to capture the life unfolding around us, but instead we are capturing this life through sketching the hidden patterns found within our data.

They're on week 28 right now. Eight of them are up on the project page.

The above cards represent when each person picked up her phone. The pair below shows when they checked their appearance in the mirror.

Mirror check

You'll notice right away the creative aim towards unique representations of the data, as each postcard comes with reading instructions. If you're familiar with Posavec and Lupi's work, you're not surprised.

What did surprise me was how distinctly their styles showed through the sketches. I mean, these are just small postcards. Lupi favors small symbols and encodings typically distinct in space, with warmer colors on a faded background. Posavec favors connections and lines with an organic feel overall, with bright colors on a white background. (At first I was reading the to address as the from address and I was really confused.)

Such a fun project. See more postcards and stay updated on new ones.

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