A record of what I learned to see from
Thirty-five influences, each drawn as an object standing in one section of the barrister bookcase in my house. Select one to read the rule it is known by, and what of it I take.
Twenty-one influences, each drawn as an object standing in the second case: what the record is kept for. Select one to read the rule it is known by, and what of it I take.
Amber marks light. Nine were made with it.
Each tick is one influence, placed at its yearFour carry no year: the round robin, watch bill, survey map and the storyboard
Each tick is one influence, placed at its year
Section A 1786
The Commercial and Political Atlas, and the 1821 wheat and wages chart
Invented the time series and the bar chart.
Section A 1869
The march on Moscow
Six variables on one plate. An army’s size drawn as the width of a line that thins as it dies.
Section A 1882, 1885
The Paris to Lyon graphical timetable, and chronophotography
Made with lightThe train schedule drawn as sloping lines on a grid of time and distance, a method Ibry devised in the 1840s and Marey made famous, and the photographic gun that cut a second of movement into frames. The one person on this shelf who was both a photographer and a quantifier.
Section A 1925 to 1940
Isotype
Pictogram counting. One mark is one unit, and a row of marks is a quantity a child can read.
Section A 1983, 2006
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
Data ink, small multiples, the ban on chartjunk, and later the sparkline, named in Beautiful Evidence in 2006. The theory under “no decoration for decoration’s sake”, and the reason the look is severe.
Section A 2005 to 2014
The personal annual reports
Made with lightOne person’s year, printed as a report with plates, tabular numerals and a masthead.
Section A 2012
The Personal Analytics of My Life
A quarter century of one person’s email, keystrokes and calendar, charted.
Section A 2014 to 2015
Dear Data
Two friends mailed each other a hand-drawn postcard of one week’s personal data, every week for a year. The closest thing on the shelf to the whole idea in one object: the weekly question, the letter, the record, the hand.
Section A 2014
April Zero, and Gyroscope
One person’s life as a live public dashboard, the first of its kind that looked designed. Gyroscope made it a product.
Section B 1494
The double-entry ledger, Summa de arithmetica
Two columns that must agree.
Section B 1948, 1950
A Mathematical Theory of Communication, and Theseus the mouse
Defined information as the resolution of uncertainty and gave it a unit, the bit, so a message became something you could measure the way you measure everything else on this shelf. Then built a mechanical mouse that learned a maze at Bell Labs, and, at home in the 1970s, juggling machines, for fun.
Section B 1890
The census machine
The drawer of cards that indexed a library, and the machine that counted a census on punched cards. Steel and brass and a dial.
Section B 1899
The sectional bookcase
You buy one section at a time and the case grows as the library does. Glass fronts, oak, brass. I own one, and this page is drawn inside it.
Section B 1917 to 1983
The Dymaxion Chronofile
Every fifteen minutes of one life filed in a scrapbook, 270 feet of shelf. The most documented human life on record.
Section B 1945
The memex, in As We May Think
A desk that holds a person’s whole record on microfilm and links it by trails.
Section B 1974 to 1987
The Time Capsules
Six hundred and ten boxes of whatever crossed the desk, sealed by month.
Section B Still written
Kept by hand, on a cadence
A packet that goes around a circle, everyone writing alone, the whole landing at once. And the letter my father writes every week.
Section C 1878
The horse in motion
Made with lightTwelve cameras, twelve frames, a second of a horse.
Section C 1930s
The strobe, the milk drop, and the bullet through the apple
Made with lightAn MIT engineer who made light short enough to freeze a millionth of a second, in a laboratory of steel benches and instruments.
Section C 1935 to 1944
The Farm Security Administration record
Made with lightThe record of a place and a people as it was, without comment.
Section C 1939 to 1941
The zone system
Made with lightLight and shadow measured on a scale of eleven zones before the shutter is pressed.
Section C 1945 to 1966
The Case Study House photographs
Made with lightCase Study House 22 at night: a glass box over Los Angeles.
Section D 1876
Tesla’s laboratories, and Bell Labs
Benches, instruments, brass and steel, and a night shift.
Section D 1949 to 1958
The Farnsworth House, the Seagram Building, the Eames House
Steel, glass, stone and oak, assembled with nothing hidden.
Section D 1955 to 1995
And the ten principles
Less but better. Honest, unobtrusive, long-lasting.
Section D 1956 onward
One system, applied everywhere
A company that treated design as one system across the logo, the products, the buildings and the annual reports. AEG and Peter Behrens did it first, in 1907. Vignelli’s grids, the subway map, and “if you can design one thing, you can design everything.”
Section D 1958
The flight data recorder
Made with lightThe one instrument on the aircraft built so that somebody could read the record afterwards.
Section D 2011 onward
The OP-1
The instrument as the whole brand: knobs, labels, a case, function you can see.
Section D 2019
Unpainted stainless steel
Flat planes, raw material shown as itself, made by robots. Beautiful in its own regard.
Section D 2020 onward
The transparent case
Transparency, literally: the case shows the parts.
Section D Every night
Who stands each watch
A crew divides the night into watches and posts who stands each one.
Section E 1977
Powers of Ten
Made with lightOne frame, then ten times wider, then ten times wider again, from a picnic to the galaxy and back down to a proton.
Section E 1997
Think Different
Seventeen misfits, no product on screen, one sentence about the company’s point of view.
Section E To scale
Ordnance Survey, and USGS topographic sheets
A place drawn to scale in fine line on paper: a scale bar, a legend, contour lines.
Section E Before the camera
Storyboards and animatics
The whole film drawn frame by frame before a camera rolls, so the film exists before it is shot.
Section F about 170
Meditations
Notes to himself, never meant for a reader, and they survived two thousand years because they were.
Section F 1580
The Essais
“I am myself the matter of my book.” The essay invented as a man trying out his own thoughts.
Section F 1660 to 1669
The diary
Nine years, every night, in shorthand, candid to the point of danger, and he stopped when his eyes failed.
Section F 1726 onward
The virtues chart
Thirteen virtues in a grid, one week per virtue, a dot for every lapse, examined every evening.
Section F 1762 to 1791
The London Journal, and the Life of Johnson
Kept a journal to become someone, then spent twenty years writing down what one man said.
Section F 1837 to 1861
The journal
Two million words over twenty-four years. The walk every afternoon, the notebook every evening, the weather and the plants and the thought they set off. He counted too: the day the pond thawed, every year.
Section F 1918 to 1941
A Writer’s Diary
Written fast, after tea, “at a rapid haphazard gallop.”
Section F 1942 to 1944
The diary
Addressed to “Kitty,” an imagined friend, because “paper has more patience than people.”
Section F 1966
On Keeping a Notebook
“We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be.”
Section G 1880s
The questionnaire
Thirty-five questions, answered at about thirteen and again at about twenty.
Section G 1900s onward
The one-line-a-day book
One line per day, the same date stacked five years deep on one page.
Section G 1902
The six honest serving men
“I keep six honest serving-men, they taught me all I knew: their names are What and Why and When and How and Where and Who.”
Section G 1937 onward
The day diaries
Hundreds of ordinary British people asked to write down their day on the twelfth of each month through 1937, and a panel of volunteer diarists who kept writing for decades after.
Section G 1974, 2003
Working, and the StoryCorps booth
An ordinary person talking about their life to someone who listens, recorded, kept. StoryCorps puts two people who love each other in a booth for forty minutes and archives it at the Library of Congress.
Section G 1992
Morning Pages
Three pages, longhand, every morning, never reread.
Section G 1997
The thirty-six questions
A fixed set, in escalating order, that produces closeness between strangers in forty-five minutes.
Section H about 1478, 1837
The notebooks
Observation and thought drawn and written on the same page, Leonardo’s mirror-written and undated, Darwin’s dated and never finished.
Section H 1944 to 1954
The diary
Painted, written, the pages bleeding into each other.
Section H 1968 to 1979
I Got Up, the Date Paintings, I Am Still Alive
A postcard every morning stamped with the time he got up, a painting of the date, a telegram saying he was alive.
Section H 1986
The Ballad of Sexual Dependency
A diary in photographs, shown as a slideshow to the people in it.
Section H 1990
Sullivan Ballou’s letter to his wife
Sullivan Ballou’s letter to his wife, read aloud over a photograph.
The whole shelf, both cases
What the first case says, read end to end
Nine of the thirty-five in the first case are photographers or made their name with light: Marey, Muybridge, Edgerton, Adams, Shulman, Evans, the Eameses’ film, Warren’s recorder, read by the light of what came after, and Felton’s reports, lit like plates. Eight are furniture or machines: the memex, the Chronofile shelf, the barrister bookcase, the card catalog, the tabulator, Shannon’s mouse, the Tanker desk, the OP-1. Six are people who kept their own record: Fuller, Warhol, Wolfram, Sharma, Felton, Lupi and Posavec.
What I was reaching for is already on the shelf.
What the heart shelf says
The product has shipped only the first. Some objects carry two mechanisms and stand in two rows. A dashed slot is named by the shelf but is not an object on it.
1
Nobody writes to a blank page. Everyone answers a question.
2
The entry gets written when the form is smaller than the resistance.
3
The record is kept on a schedule or it is not kept.
4
An entry addressed to someone gets written, and the reader I have already named is the version of me at seventy.
That is the brief for how a record gets its context, in one paragraph, from the shelf.