At the beginning of the COVID-19 lockdown in Italy, the web portal of the famed architecture and design magazine Domus launched an initiative titled “How We Live in Quarantine: the Journal”. Domus asked professionals in the design field to imagine and submit their personal version of a visual journal, to narrate how their daily habits and their relationships with spaces had changed since the start of state-wide lockdown. Together with the members of the Fōndaco design collective, we spent some time thinking how to take part in this as a team of 7 people living in 3 countries and 2 different time zones, and we thought it would be interesting to collect data about our daily routine for seven days: we kept track of time we dedicated to work, food, sleep, communications, distractions, relax, grocery runs, to better understand what had changed in our lives and what had stayed the same as before.
This exercise produced a wealth of data we used to design and produce an analog data visualization: a visual diary showing our lives over seven days as a set of symbols, highlighting the very personal rhythm of our daily actions in the unprecedented situation we were experiencing. The result was Il Tempo della Quarantena (The Time of Quarantine), a hand-drawn poster portraying a set of timelines reminiscent of musical pentagrams, one for each of the action categories we defined (left to right: stepping out of our home, food, sleep, distractions/relax, work, communications), where each line represents one of us.
Our interest in focusing on the timing and rhythm of the actions that make up our lives led us to find an important visual inspiration in the obscure geometric notation created by Brian Eno and Robert Wyatt for the visual music scores of their Ambient 1: Music for Airports album (image from Pinterest).
The hand-drawn timeline (shout out to Francesca!) that we scanned and overlaid on the "pentagram" grid to create the final version of the poster.
