VizChitra 2025: India's first community-driven Data Visualization conference

OVERVIEW

From cave paintings and memoirs to Strava activity, we love to keep a record of what we do. In 2024, as I flipped through my journals from the years before, I noticed that nothing had captured my time in a way that didn’t require reading long paragraphs. I realised I wanted to be able to log my experiences in a way that gave me a snapshot view of my time.

To build this snapshot I started collecting tiny bits of data each day as a way to track goals, habits and patterns that I found interesting. I had essentially begun to put together an album of all the micro and macro experiences of my year.

The personal data collected was based on different themes each month—ranging from daily habits and emotions to social interactions and digital footprints. The talk focuses on these monthly explorations as a way to inculcate introspection, creativity and personal data storytelling in your everyday life.

Sample - Presentation for Parallel

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• How personal data can inform slower reflections
• Creating a routine around personal data journaling
• Different ways to collect analog data
• Daily data journaling as a segue into technical data visualisation

TARGET AUDIENCE

Designers, data visualization enthusiasts, and anyone curious about using data art as a tool for personal storytelling and reflection. The talk will feature a showcase of monthly visualizations, and behind-the-scenes insights into the data collection and design process.

SPEAKER BIO

Rutu Tank is a product designer by profession, and design generalist by passion. She enjoys experimenting with different mediums like book-binding, crochet and collaging to spend her time and also to document it.

Currently an Associate Product Designer at Parallel HQ, previously a Product Design fellow at CivicDataLab
Graduated in 2024 with a major in Information Arts from Srishti Manipal.