Nicholas Felton discusses his data collection project to track the facts of his personal life
By Noor Eid
Nov. 14, 2011 11:31 p.m.
The typical student proceeds through his or her day without thinking of daily activities as a form of data. The work of Nicholas Felton challenges this paradigm.
Felton, who will be speaking at UCLA today, is a graphic designer and currently a product designer at Facebook who collects data about his personal life and daily routines and summarizes these measurements and statistics using creative visual maps, graphs and charts.
For the past six years, Felton has been creating Feltron Annual Reports. Felton said that, during his presentation for the Department of Design | Media Arts, he will be speaking about the process of making the annual reports and also about this data-centric versus storytelling method he has been exploring. According to Felton, he realized he had a story to tell, and that his life had all the content he needed to push the envelope of collecting information and reporting these things to people in an intriguing way.
Felton said that this process is not much of an imposition, as he has managed to train himself to keep track of personal life information as data. In addition, he said his obsession and commitment to this project has him more frustrated when he fails to report something rather than annoyed at having to keep abreast of all these things to begin with.
“You discover these invisible strings of data and they’re really rich information and now I just can’t let them go to waste,” Felton said.
Felton is also the co-creator of Daytum.com, a site that allows others to engage in this type of personal data collection he performs. The site is wide open for people to start recording anything they desire and watch as these daily occurrences build up into stories and compositions.
“Some people use it for health and fitness tracking and other people use it for more amusing things like keeping track of their dog’s trip to the park or how many overnight visitors their couch has,” said Felton.
Casey Reas, a professor in the Design | Media Arts department, is the co-initiator of Processing, which allows visual artists and designers to write their own software and programs.
“Nicholas has used Processing for the last two annual reports as a way of visualizing the data in a different way than he has been able to,” said Reas.
According to Reas, Felton is working in an area in which a lot of design focus is on information visualization.
“He is working with data and working with very immaterial aspects, but then he’s marrying it with beautiful craft and quality too,” said Reas.
Reas invited Nicholas Felton to come to UCLA after he saw his lecture last June at a conference in Minneapolis. He said he thought the presentation was fantastic and wanted Felton to come speak for the students in the Design | Media Arts department.
David Leonard, a second-year graduate student in the Design | Media Arts department, said The Feltron Report stands alone in a lot of ways in its pursuit of personalizing life through data.
“Our data is everywhere, and making sense of that data to help us know ourselves and be in control of (the data about our lives) is important and is going to shape the way we live,” said Leonard.
