Eclipse by Ana Lúcia Ribeiro

ECLIPSE is a personal project I developed from start to finish: conceptualization, data collection, visualization design, and the handcrafted production of the book-object. This book tells the story of 30 days in my 2024, without words, using data I gathered.

For 30 days, I recorded my social interactions and emotional states on small paper cards, hour by hour. Using this data and its personal meaning, I explored different visualization techniques to translate something deeply personal into a visually engaging project.

To narrate my days, I represented myself as a white circle, resembling the Moon. Other people were assigned different shapes, and interactions emerged where these forms overlapped. The idea was to show how each person’s presence influences, affects, and transforms me. In this book, each person is a celestial body, interacting with mine through shape. From these overlapping forms came the idea of an eclipse. Emotions were represented through color, appearing around the shapes to illustrate how feelings permeate moments of interaction.

ECLIPSE consists of a box containing a user manual, 30 cards, and an object I call the “clock.”

The manual provides details about the book’s components, visual instructions for assembling the clock, a legend for the colors and shapes, and explanations of the data visualizations. It was designed with minimal text, relying primarily on visual communication.

Each card represents one day’s data. Each card holds a circular diagram, split into 24 sections, one for each hour of the day. The information is arranged hour by hour, forming 24 "moons" in a circular layout. Each moon represents me alone or interacting with others and how I felt at that moment. The clock is a tool for reading the story, designed to reveal only one hour at a time, allowing the passage of time to unfold sequentially.

The project began with data collection. From there, I translated that data into a visual narrative, sketching out different representations and imagining what the final piece would become. The process involved defining how the data would be displayed, encoding, and designing the cards, prototyping the clock, and developing every component of the book. Every element was crafted from paper, including the box and sleeve, both of which were screen-printed. Each detail was designed to embody the concept of "eclipse" throughout the entire book.

ECLIPSE is a personal exploration of the quiet beauty in everyday moments, a way of seeing the whole by piecing together the fragments of each lived and shared hour.