On the Clock - A Time-Diary of our Lives by Julia Borsi

A handmade data object designed by three members of Starschema’s Data Visualization team; created purely for experimentation and outside work hours. The project was originally submitted to the Dear Nightingale challenge from the Data Visualization Society’s Nightingale magazine. Born out of Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec’s delightful Dear Data project, the challenge calls for vizzes focused on personal details, created in physical form — and no drawing allowed.

Our work encapsulates what a workday looks like for the three of us that worked on this analog data object. How to read: the two dials represent twelve hours of the day (a.m. and p.m.) with each circle around the dials showing the daily routine of one person in twenty-minute intervals.

Divided our weekdays into five categories: sleep, commute, paid work, unpaid work (anything from household chores to learning), and fun. For us, it was fascinating to see in a visual format how our days differ from each other’s and how they’re similar. For example, we arrive at and leave the office at very different hours but always make sure to get lunch and coffee together — which is categorized as fun, obviously.

Working on this project gave us a renewed appreciation for physical media. We thoroughly enjoyed the tangible collaboration of gluing the watch parts onto the paper, one by one, together, our monotone efforts contributing to a single, shared product. This experience is not something one can easily get from working on a computer, behind a screen — but we definitely expect its benefits to translate to projects carried out under our traditional work circumstances as well.

Authors: István Korompai, Júlia Borsi, Tamás Varga