It’s about that time when most people carve a minute or two out of their busy schedules to think about the year that was – to recount, reflect, and learn. For the last three, Nicholas Felton has been taking the exercise several steps further with his Feltron Annual Report: a statistical analysis of the things he did, saw, consumed, and performed over the preceding year, compiled into one visually stunning anthology. Felton, a NY-based graphic designer, has been recording nearly every aspect of his daily life to uncover patterns in his behavior and share them in a telling and compelling way. Everything from romantic encounters and beers consumed to streets traversed and lost billiards games are recorded in his 2007 edition in the form of colorful maps, lists, and charts. The result is pretty remarkable: a snapshot of a total stranger’s very personal life experiences – as fascinatingly detailed as it is impersonal.
The Wall Street Journal offers some insight on the Feltron Report and our expanding capacity for archiving and sharing the minutiae of our daily doings (an idea we’ve been following for a while here at PSFK) and its implications in our private and public lives. While the desire to analyze our day to day habits is nothing new (think Benjamin Franklin’s Pursuit for Moral Perfection), the tools and technology available to us have made it possible to analyze (and experiment with) our lives like the science it may be:
The objective for Mr. Felton and others is to seize data back from the statisticians and the scientists and incorporate it into our daily lives. Everyone creates data — every smile, conversation and car ride is a potential datapoint. These quotidan aggregators believe that the compilation of our daily activities can reveal the secret patterns that govern the way we live. For students of personal informatics, the practice is liberating because it shows that our lives aren’t random, and are more orderly than some might expect.
…[Felton] plans to continue his project over the next decade in what he hopes will result in a modern-day spin on James Boswell’s famously detailed biography of Samuel Johnson. “I want to create connections where I didn’t know that they existed,” Mr. Felton says. “I’m a natural annotator.”
Felton’s reports can be found online as well as in hard copy form here. Those interested in conducting their own research should also check out Mycrocosm, a tool created by MIT Media Lab’s Yannick Assogba that builds visual charts from nearly anything you want to measure. But, as some info-trackers warn, our capacity to monitor and archive every bit of our lives may come at a hefty price – our sanity:
“It becomes an obsession,” says Toli Galanis, an aspiring filmmaker in New York who tracks everything from his mercury levels to his vitamin D consumption. He says that he’s had to forgo outings with friends when he’s trying a new diet that requires scheduled mealtimes, and elicits strange looks from his parents when he measures his dinner food to the ounce.
Still, he adds, “Life and its goals are like a lab. Why not use it like a scientist? Then you’ll really know what you want to. There’s so much info that it’d be a shame not to track it.”
Wall Street Journal: The New Examined Life
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