Meeting Nicholas Felton

Posted 2010.04.15

Last week at the PSFK conference I watched Nicholas Felton present his 2009 Feltron annual report. He has been preparing annual reports about his life since 2005. This involves him gathering enormous amounts of data about what he does every day. He then visualizes that data in his annual reports which really are pieces of data visualization art. In his most recent annual report he outsourced the data collection to anyone he met during the year for more than 5 minutes. He gave them little cards and asked them to fill out an online questionnaire about the encounter.

In one of the questions he asked people to describe his mood in one word. This gave him a list of words describing his mood throughout the entire year. He then translated this list of words into a happiness score by asking people on Amazon Mechanical Turk to rate the words on a happiness scale of 1-10. This allowed him to map happiness scores to the words in a way that allowed him to create an average happiness score for every day based on the words people used to describe his mood. I found this a very ingenious way of outsourcing what would otherwise have been an almost impossible task of classifying every word.

If you want to find out more about the feltron report you can watch this video.

I caught up with Nicholas over lunch and asked him what tools he uses to gather all the data. He mentioned that he does it all manually through a diary and that he wouldn’t want to do it any other way. He thinks the data collection is an integral part of creating the annual reports. For him, part of the gratification seems to lie in the manual data collection. I also asked him whether he found any utility in the annual reports. Whether they affected the way he lived his life. Apparently there was no utility at all … .

If you want to collect data as well you can use Daytum - a website Felton has created to help you do this. Good luck.