This set of tableware by designer Iohanna Pani conveys personal statistical data. Source: designboom

A company lets you enter in cities you've been to and generates a physical mesh to order as a necklace, earrings, or cufflinks. Source: http://meshu.io/

Alice Thudt, a PhD student in Computational Media Design, crafts pieces of pottery that embody data about moments she shared with her loved ones. Left image (2015): cereal bowls showing Skype-call history between Alice and her parents. On the front bowl, each line represents a day where they skyped. On the other bowl, each dot represents 10 min of call time. She offered a bowl as a present to her parents and kept the other one as a reminder to stay in touch every time she has breakfast. Middle image (2016): teapot showing instant messages containing the word "love" that Alice and her boyfriend exchanged since they started dating. Each dotted line represents one year; one dot stands for 10 messages. The teapot shows how they went from a long-distance relationship to recent years when they were geographically closer and texting was less necessary. Right image (2016): bowl showing the productivity of Alice's boyfriend over the course of one year, offered to him as a birthday gift – the outside surface shows git commits, while the inside shows the number of emails sent per month. Life in Clay explores turning data about my life and the lives of my loved ones into functional pottery. By making objects that can be touched, loved and used every day I want to give our elusive personal data a physical presence. The pattern of each handcrafted artifact represents a precious memory, experience or relationship that I want to remember or remind others of. The data pots create opportunities for the stories hidden in my data to be serendipitously reencountered, shared over dinner with friends or silently reflected upon with a cup of coffee on the couch. Sources: Alice Thudt (2017) Life in Clay. Alice Thudt, Uta Hinrichs and Sheelagh Carpendale (2017) Data Craft: Integrating Data into Daily Practices and Shared Reflections.

      Images created by students to represent their personal data. Refer to the publication below for image attributions. I describe the results of implementing a personal data physicalization assignment in an information visualization course for senior undergraduate and graduate students in computer science and software engineering. By collecting data about themselves and representing this data in physical forms, students were able to i) learn about data visualization, ii) design creatively; and iii) learn about themselves. While data physicalization in education has been explored with non-technical and novice audiences, the experience I report in this paper provides evidence that data physicalization also has benefits for technical, visualization-savvy students. Also check out our entry 2010 – Data Sculptures in Class Sources: Charles Perin. What Students Learn with Personal Data Physicalization. CG&A SPecial Issue on Visualization Education, 2021.10.1109/MCG.2021.3115417. Author pre-print available at https://hal.inria.fr/hal-03360714. Charles Perin. Personal Data Physicalization assignment v1. University of Victoria Information Visualization course. 2019. Charles Perin. Personal Data Physicalization assignment v2. University of Victoria Information Visualization course. 2021.

Travels on the Wind is a tangible data visualization of a decade of travel. Each year is represented by a vertical thread with rings and beads encoding data about trip duration, region, season, transportation, accommodation, and companions. The piece was handcrafted over several months using 3D-printed elements, jewelry findings, and UV epoxy resin. Suspended from driftwood, it is both a personal story and a physical expression of data art. Sources: Project’s website Information is Beautiful Awards