Nicholas Felton, creator of
the Feltron Annual Report and founder of
Daytum had a pretty interesting interview over at the
SVA Interaction Design blog where he talks about his projects and general outlook on collecting data. One thing he said in particular stood out to me, as it paralells something I've been thinking about a lot lately.
"The first step -- and the one we're concentrating on -- is empowering people to collect information about their lives that tends to go uncollected. Our electronic footprints are everywhere, but I don't believe they're necessarily the most interesting or comprehensive records. Once we've made the gathering as easy and detailed as it can be, some interesting things might start happening. I can imagine how counting fireflies over the summer would make a poetic record of the way the summer was spent for an individual, but if 100 or 1,000 people are doing the same thing, does it start to tell an aggregate story that speaks more to global warming or habitat loss?"
This ability of this aggregate data view to change behavior is something I'm totally fascinated by.