Rhizome has a nice short interview up with infographic & data designer Nicholas Felton about how he came into the field and where he got the idea for his popular “Annual Report”.
I read Catch 22 while I was in Japan, and it kind of changed it for me, thinking about Japan’s WWII experience, and I was reading about Italian fear of war, and it became very visual for me – there were a lot of weird conversations that were hard to put together on the page. I made maps of that stuff, and eventually I was treating Catch 22 like it was real, and making artifacts from it. In the spirit of Catch 22 I made artifacts that weren’t in the book, but came out of that contradictory world. That’s when I felt like I was always going to be bound to the book; if you hadn’t read it then the things that I made were kind of disappointing. I think thats why I was looking for better sources. The next project I made was a postcard project, where my girlfriend and I at the time took our activities in New York and transposed that onto an imaginary road trip. So that was kind of a blend of this world and a fictional world, and that was probably my first trial with taking day to day experience and turning it into a design exercise.
via Rhizome | Storytelling: An Interview With Nicholas Felton.
