99% Invisible - 99% Invisible-31- Feltron Annual Report

Episode Date: July 14, 2011

Nicholas Felton is an information designer. Since 2005, he has tabulated thousands upon thousands of tiny measurements in his life and designed stunning graphs and maps and created concise infographics that detail that year’s activities. The results were originally intended … Continue reading →

We get support from UC Davis, a globally ranked university, working to solve the world's most pressing problems in food, energy, health, education, and the environment. UC Davis researchers collaborate and innovate in California and around the globe to find transformational solutions. It's all part of the university's mission to promote quality of life for all living things. Find out more at 21stCentury.ucdavis.edu. This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. The 2009 Feltron Annual Report. From this moment on, I want you to record every encounter you have with another person. Total encounters.

Each mode of transportation. Methods of transportation. 23. Like, if I walk through the door, I'm writing down the name of that door. Total locations reported. 258. I just want to know every single place that I go. That's Nicholas Felton, aka Beltron.

I'm just trying to build a super rich data set. Data sets that he will interrogate at the end of the year, designing pie charts and bar graphs that are used to create a concise infographic that tells the story of Nicholas Felton's year. Is it going to be through the lens of like my favorite ETM or is it going to be through the person I spend the most time with? Most encounters with one person, 226. He calls the beautifully designed result, the Feltron Annual Report. Well, the thing that's really relatable about this report, that is the voice of freelance journalist Nate Berg. He interviewed Felton in New York for us. Not only is it clear and kind of easy to understand in the sort of graphs and pie charts that we've all gotten used to seeing all over the place,

but I mean, it's presenting stuff directly kind of out of my own life, too. New York restaurants visited 111. How many restaurants did I go to last year? How many beers did I drink? Ice cream flavors consumed 9. These are all things that I do when having the data and the ability to present it helps draw that connection between two essentially strangers. All the easy dismissive criticisms about four square check-ins and Twitter should be popping into your mind right now. They all boil down to this.

Why do I care about what you had for breakfast this morning? And I get that. But a funny thing happens when you take what you had for breakfast this morning and multiply it by a hundred of its quotidian equivalents and multiply that times 365. He's doing exactly what everyone else is doing, but he's just doing it in a more purposeful way. It's not only that he wants to track what's happening and kind of see how his life changes over time, but presented in a way that's digestible to himself and other people, even strangers. What Nicholas Felden creates with all that sprawling information

superficially resembles a corporate quarterly report, but it's the most beautiful version of that that you could possibly imagine, a true work of art. Most consecutive exclamation marks used, eight. 2008 was pretty boring year, I didn't travel very much. So the highlights were like first ice cream of the year, but it's this elaborate piece of design work that took weeks to create and cost thousands of dollars to produce to document this like one tiny memory that would have been totally lost otherwise It's my favorite way of telling stories now

It's this way of making things that are either invisible or too large to be Comprehended making them visible rather than the abstractions of looking at tables of numbers. There's a pretty compelling and memorable ways of revealing invisible stories. It puts more focus on the little things that make up most of your time. Your life isn't really that trip that you took last summer. It's, you know, like the countable times that you walk down the same way to get to your office at one house in the corner

with that crazy dog. How many hours of your life have you spent listening to hotel California on the radio? I have to break in here to say this is where a normal public radio show would play the song Hotel California, but I am your friend, and I would never do that to you. That's the beauty of this kind of representation, is you can take something that represents millions or even billions of actions and reduce it to something that's consumable.

Average Waters per day, 0.24. Average beers per day, 0.99. Average beers per day, 0.99. Fulton has been doing this in-depth self-reporting since 2005, but at the end of 2010, his father died. And so the 2010 annual report took on a whole new scope. He took kind of that same approach, but applied it, you know, on a much grander scale to someone's entire life, the life of his father. The 2010 Feltron Annual Report. I didn't want my 2010 report to be the story of my father's death. I think his death is the least interesting part of his life story. Items cataloged.

4,348. So I wanted to make something that talked about his life. Passport stamps, 239. It's like writing a biography about someone who's just in a different format, I think. And perhaps a more valid one, one that's more rooted in the facts, right? It is like a direct translation, there's very little, very little of my opinion that shows up in here. It's further back, it's in the editing, it's in the curation that my opinion shows up.

Postcards received 169. Photos of Gordon in record, 93. Percentage of photos of Gordon wearing a tie, 18%. It's his life story, so it's bookended by his birth and sadly by his death, but you know, that's one of the things I want to remember about him, and I think it's part of his story is that's the day he died, and that was what the weather was like, was the next statistic. I'm not trying to be shocking about it, but it needs to be in there.

And I wanted to have a little repose at the end where you could sort of just absorb the end of his narrative. Last day, September 12th, 2010. I didn't want to dwell on sickness or his spirit fading. I think that's in there. If you look at a lot of the graphs, you can see a decline in meals out. It's kind of foreshadowed throughout the document that the spring has stepped.

It was diminished in his last few years. My challenge was to try and take that idea of a biography and put it in a new form that I hadn't seen before. And, you know, you have to give up on not seeing him smile, like not seeing him in motion, not hearing his voice or, you know, listening to one of his jokes. But that's part of the aggregate view, that's part of this, this grander scope that I was going for. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Nate Berg and me Roman Mars. You can find Nate Berg's work at NateHeifenberg.com. I should also mention here that the voice of data in this piece was done by the lovely

and talented Missed Is May Mars. The show 99% Invisible was made possible with support from Lunar, making a difference with creativity. It's a project of KALW, 91.7 local public radio in San Francisco, the American Institute of Architects in San Francisco, in the center for architecture and design. To find out more, including links to the Feltron website and the annual reports which you really do have to see, go to 99%invisible.org. Hello everyone, it's Roman Mars again. I just wanted to welcome a bunch of new people

to the 99th percentile because iTunes has been featuring the show on the big banner and the iTunes podcast store. So thanks to them, they were so great. I think we've got a bunch of new people thanks to that little quote from Jad of them, Rod of Radio Lab encouraging people to check out the show and the prime placement. So thanks for checking us out and I just want to let you know that all the old episodes of Nine Emperes and Abyssalville, first of all, they're all pretty good, some are better than others, but they're all pretty good and they're all what we call evergreen in the radio business. So they're not pegged any certain date, the information isn't too old or doesn't get deprecated very fast, so just download them all, check check them out and I hope you enjoy them.

Also I want to thank all the folks who've already done iTunes reviews. I put a call out for these, we got tons of them, we're going to pantalysically close to getting 300 ratings and reviews, which I'm really psyched for and you wouldn't believe how much they helped, they just they help tremendously and it's just very very kind and very sweet and people have been writing very, very nice things. Thank you so much. It's been fantastic. Alright, I think that's it for this week. So if you want to get in touch, you can always follow us on Facebook.

I put some stuff there that I don't always put on the blog, so maybe you want to join on Facebook. You follow me on Twitter if you like your 9-inch and invisible news. I've heard with a bunch of nonsense for me in my personal life, that's at Roman Mars, or you can just leave a comment on the blog, that would be fantastic. I'd love to hear from you. Alright, take care, and I'll talk to you next week. you