This TED Talk features designer Georgia Lupi,

recorded live at TED NYC 2017.

This is what my last week looked like.

What I did, who I was with, the main sensations I had for every waking hour, if the feeling came as I thought of my dad who recently passed away,

or if I could have just definitely avoided the worries and anxieties.

And if you think I'm a little obsessive, you're probably right.

But clearly, from this visualization, you can learn much more about me than from this other one,

which are images you're probably more familiar with, and which you possibly even have on your

phone right now.

Bar charts for the steps you've walked,

high charts for the quality of your sleep, the path of your morning runs. In my day job, I work with

data. I run a data visualization design company, and we design and develop ways to make

information accessible through visual representations. And what my job has taught me over the years

is that to really understand data and their true potential,

sometimes we actually have to forget about them and see through them instead.

Because data are always just a tool we use to represent reality.

They're always just a placeholder for something else,

but they are never the real thing.

But let me step back for a moment when I first understood this personally.

In 1994, I was 13 years old.

I was a teenager in Italy.

I was too young to be interested in politics, but I knew their

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