Personal Daily
Editorial
2023
Nowadays, people are used to getting information from the internet or smart phone apps. With the develpment of technology, People’s interest is easy to be analyzed by the calculations of artificial intelligence, so that more and more information under the similar categories is offered to the user. Back and forth, a unique “daily” is ready for a certain user to view, which is so called “information cacoon”. The theory is raised by the MIT Media Lab founder, Nicholas Negroponte. This project is a visualization of this “personal daily” phenomenon. I collected different people’s viewing contents within the same app and created a series of physical newspaper based on them.
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*This work won the Merit Award in GDC Award 23.
40 Icons of Categories
Including myself, I collected eleven samples. I asked people to take screenshots of forty contents the app offers them based on big data, and then classified them into forty categories. After that, I created icons for each category. I adopted pixelated style to create forty icons, because the basic units of the electronic world are pixels. The color palette is also meticulously selected. I chose nine colors. Each color represents a certain feature of a category. For every category, I selected three to four features in total to represent one category.
Utilization of Computing
In order to reinforce the theme of “selection by artificial intelligence (big data)”, I used computing to generate a visualization of the forty contents. I first counted the number of each category of one of the eleven people with the help of my friend, then put the number into a series of code. To make it work, I used a computing app called “Processing”. After clicking the play button, an image would appear, which is a visualization of that person’s “personal daily”.
the Cover and Back Cover
In order to reinforce the theme of “selection by artificial intelligence (big data)”, I used computing to generate a visualization of the forty contents. I first counted the number of each category of one of the eleven people with the help of my friend, then put the number into a series of code. To make it work, I used a computing app called “Processing”. After clicking the play button, an image would appear, which is a visualization of that person’s “personal daily”.
Inner Spreads
There’re three sections (spreads) within this newspaper. The first spread is an explanation of the making process of the image. The second spread is a collage of the code to create the images. The third one is a collage of the physical forty contents of that user.
"Our Personal Dailies"
Every people have their own personal dailies. We are all trapped in an information cacoon big data weaves for us. After realizing this fact, we would notice that our perspectives are very limited, and that it could reflect what kind of people we are in a certain way.
Interactive Installation
This project is essentially an investigation of different people. In this installation, people scan the QR code to have the image directly projected to the board. Therefore, the difference of the contents between distinct people is displayed, letting them rethink how deep they are inside the information cacoon.
