Luxury Watch Chart

We encounter it in the morning newspaper as a jagged line depicting the stock market's latest anxieties, on our fitness apps as a series of neat bars celebrating a week of activity, in a child's classroom as a colourful sticker chart tracking good behaviour, and in the background of a television news report as a stark graph illustrating the inexorable rise of global temperatures. Another potential issue is receiving an error message when you try to open the downloaded file, such as "The file is corrupted" or "There was an error opening this document. This was the part I once would have called restrictive, but now I saw it as an act of protection. Furthermore, the concept of the "Endowed Progress Effect" shows that people are more motivated to work towards a goal if they feel they have already made some progress. It was a tool, I thought, for people who weren't "real" designers, a crutch for the uninspired, a way to produce something that looked vaguely professional without possessing any actual skill or vision. The hand-drawn, personal visualizations from the "Dear Data" project are beautiful because they are imperfect, because they reveal the hand of the creator, and because they communicate a sense of vulnerability and personal experience that a clean, computer-generated chart might lack.