Dear Data is a year-long correspondence project between two designers, Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec, who sent each other weekly hand-drawn postcards visualizing personal data. Through charts and sketches, the project transforms ephemeral experiences into visual keepsakes, an artful archive of memory made from the raw material of daily life.
Data underpins the systems, decisions, and technologies that shape our daily experiences. It influences everything from what we see online to how we are evaluated, treated, and even predicted by institutions. Credit scores and standardized tests, social media feeds, recommendation engines, nudges, badges, and alerts all shape the pace and direction of our lives. However, data can be much more than a tool for efficiency. As Dear Data demonstrates, we can use data to notice and appreciate the daily moments outside our obsession with productivity.
Each week for a year, Lupi and Posavec chose a theme. They then visualized the data by hand on postcards and mailed them across the ocean to one another. By choosing an analog approach with pens and paper instead of digital tools, they emphasized slowness, subjectivity, and personal connection.
Take, for instance, a postcard that charts a week’s worth of laughter. It follows a chronological layout from left to right. Each circle represents a laugh. The size of the circle shows how big the laugh was, the color of the outline indicates the reason behind it, and a dot inside marks who the artist was with. All the instructions for interpreting the drawing were written on the back of the postcard.
Like journals or photo albums, these postcards they hold onto moments that might otherwise dissolve into the rush of daily life. The act of recording transforms fleeting experiences into something tangible and enduring. In this way, data becomes a form of personal memory
We use smartwatches to measure our sleep and count our steps. Calendars break our days into units of time. To-do lists track our productivity. But most systems overlook the smaller, less measurable aspects of our lives. Dear Data makes room for what often goes untracked: interruptions, thank-yous, complaints, and moments of waiting. These themes challenge the idea that data must be numerical or machine-readable. Instead, data becomes a way to notice and value the personal and subjective.
Visually, the postcards look nothing like dashboards or spreadsheets. The hand-drawn graphics are playful, irregular, and filled with character. Others follow grids or free-form paths. Colors shift in meaning from week to week. These choices are not just decorative. They reflect the individuality and emotion embedded in the data itself.
There is something powerful about tracking yourself, not through an app that collects information passively, but by actively observing, recording, and interpreting your own life. Dear Data invites us to slow down and reclaim this process. What might we discover if we tracked the things that don't show up in our digital lives? The moments that made us smile, the ways we spent our attention, the times we looked out the window. Personal data collection becomes a kind of journaling, a way to pay attention to the texture of everyday life. And in visualizing those patterns, we might not only come to understand ourselves better. We might also learn to see beauty in the ordinary.
Miguel Botero is an editor and project manager at Memria. He has co-produced more than thirty narrative projects on peacebuilding in collaboration with filmmakers and podcasters in Colombia.