It’s always thrilling to look back on your life and see how often it’s the smallest of interactions that completely change your life’s direction and set you on a new path.

For us, it was a conversation over a beer, where, barely knowing each other, we nervously started dreaming of ways to collaborate. This small interaction was the impetus for a project that consumed the next two years of our lives as well as became the foundation for a working relationship that, while not without its struggles, has developed into a collaboration with unexpected longevity.

We are two data visualization designers living on either side of the Atlantic (Giorgia in New York, and Stefanie in London) who live lives seemingly in parallel. We met, and — struck by how many personal and work similarities we shared — we wanted to get to know each other better. So we challenged ourselves, we would do this this using the material we were most familiar with: data.

For our project Dear Data, each week throughout a year we collected and measured different types of personal data relating to our lives and then visualized it as a drawing on a postcard which we then sent as a type of “slow data” transmission of our personalities and our days to the other person.