I wanted to write about Jonathan Harris for quite some time. I love his work and what he tries to find or tell with it. He has done some amazing data-visualisation projects like We feel fine, I want you to want me or Sputnik, but what I think is his most interesting work are projects with a clear storytelling approach and giving the user some chance to find their own way through the story. The Whale Hunt is such a project. Harris was taking a photograph every five minutes on a journey to a Eskimo family in Alaska and joined them on their Whale Hunt. Like a heartbeat he was rising the number of photographs in moments of excitement. The user can now choose characters, topics and heartbeat to create an individual story.

Another project, what apparently never got published, is called Balloons of Bhutan. The project collected interviews with 117 people in Bhutan about happiness. Harris was talking about that in a TED talk (below). Many of it reminds me of the ideas we had when we developed our project HUMANS.

His latest project is called Today and is something what became somehow a fashion in the last year. A daily photo project that he started when he turned 30 to remember and collect his own stories in life. Some great pictures and a interesting narrative in the video.

“I wanted to find a way to be more in the moment, to be more in every day; to understand time more and to understand my life more, to have more memories — all of these things. Basically, to live more richly, as a human life, not just as a work life.”       ~ Jonathan Harris

“No matter what you do in your life, what you create, what career you have, whether you have a family or kids, or make a lot of money… your greatest creation is always going to be your life’s story. Because it’s like this container that holds all of those other things. That was something I was really interested in with this project, thinking about life itself as a creation, as a story that you’re writing.”

~ Jonathan Harris