Jaqaur – LookingOutwards07

http://lifewinning.com/projects/center-for-missed-connections/

I chose to write about Ingrid Burrington primarily because I love her website, resume, and general sense of humor. That being said, I also really appreciate the cool projects she has done, many of which are not really data visualization, but just humorous or nice-looking things. One project that is a little more data-visualization-y is “The Center for Missed Connections.”

It’s an art project disguised as a think tank dedicated to the study of loneliness in cities. It comes in the form of a booklet full of maps, charts, and forms, and while these may be a bit fictionalized, they are still presented as one would present real data, and it almost takes more artistic and critical thinking to fictionalize and plot data than to just plot data you got from somewhere else. Perhaps a little off-the-mark for a data-vis Looking Outwards, but I think it is still a nice project, whose real value comes not from the “data” but from the idea behind studying loneliness in the first place.