No one appreciates getting mail more than your mother. With a fair amount of what-are-you-doing with your life criticism. She is Asian, and I have two art degrees.
My reading material for joy right now is “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feyman!” by Richard P. Feynman – famous physicist for The Manhattan Project and breaker of locks. In it he recounts the story of how he convinced his classmates that a French curve was special because it is “made so that at the lowest point on each curve, no matter how you turn it, the tangent is horizontal.”
The derivative (tangent) of any curve is zero (horizontal).The point of the story is that “people don’t learn by understanding; they learn by some other way.” – often overlooking what they already knew. So this project that I am pursuing is doing just that, looking at what I already know from a different perspective in order to make new discoveries.
I wanted to but was not able to attend the EyeO conference on data visualization last year, but I did dig deeper into the works of the panelists. One of which was Georgia Lupi who created a year’s worth of hand drawn data viz postcards share with Stephanie Prozavec. I am testing out my own abilities using their weekly Dear Data model.
Each week, I will create a new data viz postcard tracking some mundane behavior, and mail it to my parents. In some ways, this cryptic communication can be easier than crossing the generational and linguistic gap of immigrants. I don’t have to write about my emotions, although it is always present.