Joyful Frugality
Degrowth creates joyful and dignified lives for everyone, while keeping the planet healthy. Personal practices are a way to implement degrowth values and foster a mindset shift. This doesn’t mean ecological collapse is the responsibility of the individual—it means ways of being and acting differently are achievable now. These practices are also known as voluntary simplicity or frugal abundance. They are based on the idea of enoughness—being content with having needs met and working against excessive want. This work is an example of my research into data humanism and information design executed through letterpress printing.
This is part of my MFA thesis work that included engaging in personal practices for degrowth, collecting data on my behavior, and creating information designs utilizing that data. I executed my data visualizations through the process of letterpress printing.
This work is also an example of my research into data humanism. This field seeks to bridge the gap between raw data and the lived experiences of individuals, emphasizing the importance of context, empathy, and ethical considerations. Data humanism is an interdisciplinary concept that draws from fields such as data science, sociology, philosophy, and design. At its core, it challenges the conventional view of data as a detached, objective entity and advocates for a more holistic understanding that incorporates the human element.
My data collection period lasted for 2 months during the fall of 2023. I’d originally planned to collect data for 3 months as a symbolic alignment with the capitalist system of recording economic data in quarters, but I pivoted due to circumstances beyond my control.
This print shown above that came off the inked-up pink press represents my usage of the dryer. I air dried all my laundry for the vast majority of my data collection period. It’s titled “I only used the dryer 3 times.”
While I was engaging in collecting data on my personal degrowth practices, transportation was the data category that had the highest impact on my daily life. I made the deliberate choice to only drive my car when absolutely necessary—my need to drive was minimized by already having chosen housing close to the uni and taking on a part-time job I could walk to.
Public transit is an environmentally healthy alternative to driving—but in many areas of the US, public transit infrastructure is underdeveloped or nonexistent. I reside in a small college in town in rural North Carolina where the public transit infrastructure is limited to a city bus system that does not run on a schedule. Public transit was not a viable alternative to driving my car for my transportation needs. Thus, much of my movement was achieved by walking and cycling. Besides the requisite able body, cycling also has the consideration of infrastructure. Without dedicated lanes for bicycle travel, riding amongst the cars and trucks can be quite dangerous. Unfortunately, there isn’t much bicycle-friendly infrastructure in my town, so I did quite a bit of walking when I would have preferred to cycle.
Walking & Biking
This data viz depicts how far I drove my car, shown in odometer mileage.
Over the course of 61 days, I drove my car 15 times. It would’ve been 12, but I was late to a meeting, I wanted to wear heels to a party (and not walk), and there was a dogmergency.
Private cars are a collective high-impact strain on our environment and ourselves. The exhaust pollutes the air, the tires shed particulate matter, cars contribute to noise pollution, their manufacture requires a great deal of extraction, and their maintenance generates quite a bit of waste. Besides all that, the infrastructure required for private cars to be our primary method of transportation significantly alters our world. A collective shift away from cars would make a huge contribution in working towards a healthy planet and healthy people.
Minimizing Driving
During the fall of 2023, I worked consciously to disengage from my phone. I turned off notifications for as many applications as possible, implemented a screen time limit for social media, and removed Reddit and Twitter. I maintained accounts I use for messaging and Instagram, because Instagram counts as work for me (or at least I convince myself of that).
Despite working to get away from my phone, I still picked the damn thing up 5,391 times. Each of the lowercase letter i’s shown here represents one pick-up.
The smartphone is an omnipresent feature of contemporary life, and has caused some to posit that humans should now be considered cyborgs. In 2014, Chief Supreme Court Justice John Roberts wrote a majority opinion stating that “modern cell phones . . . are now such a pervasive and insistent part of daily life that the proverbial visitor from Mars might conclude they were an important feature of human anatomy.”
I picked up my phone 5,391 times
Related to using the phone, this data visualization—executed through the process of letterpress printing in combination with collage—covers my personal data on using email during the fall of 2023.
Each circle here represents a day, and the size corresponds with the number of times I checked my email. The small green ones represent checking my email once that day, darker pinkish orange is twice, light orange is thrice, and for the big blue green one I recorded “so many times” on a day I was landing a contract with a client. The circles that are colorful outlines represent days I didn’t check my email at all!
I also removed email from my phone during these 61 days of collecting data. I highly recommend trying this, it’s quite liberating.
Damn Emails
A key component of embodying degrowth values is decoupling oneself from work. This includes both the physicality of engaging in labor and the mental state of tying self-worth and validation to productivity. One of the ways that work has permeated the boundaries of working hours and working location is email. In particular, access to email via smartphones has, for many, created a culture of constant availability. Email has also become a frontier for demonstrating that one is doing work and for compensating for the precarity that accompanies a disorganized labor force.
Emails pinging through during personal time serve the function to pressure people to become their job—the productive, moral, “good” worker. In addition to receiving emails at any time, constant access to sending emails engenders the hubristic attitude that the schedule of everyone else belongs to the sender. Let’s reject these notions about work and engage in more rest—and more time away from our damn emails.
Working to implement degrowth values as an individual is important, but does not supplant the need for policy measures. I chose to be politically active during my period of data collection during the fall of 2023 by sending a daily postcard to an elected official. This includes representatives at the municipal, state, and federal government levels.
Overall, there are ten elected public officials who (in theory) work to carry out the will of the people. I focused the subject of each post card on what I felt drawn to at the time of writing. Topics included public transit infrastructure, establishing dedicated bicycle lanes, renewable energy initiatives, education policy, student loan forgiveness, and calling for an Israeli ceasefire and condemnation of the genocide of Palestinians.
Contacting Politicians
This info design print covers my personal data on how I set my thermostat during the fall of 2023. Additional data points covered here include the temperature outside and the weather conditions.
During the data collection period, I kept the thermostat at 85 degrees when I left town, 78 degrees when I was home (with one exception), and turned the HVAC system off once high temperatures began falling.
I use letterpress printing, drawing by hand, and collaging to depict my data. In this work, I selected which data points to include, the date of data collection, how I analyzed it, and how I am presenting it. There is a person making these choices about every data set. The way I am depicting the data makes this clear, and keeps the human role from getting lost.
The Temperature & The Thermostat
The only clothes I bought were 10 pairs of socks
Clothing and the fashion industry are fraught with both ecological and social issues. One way to mitigate the negative impacts of covering ourselves is to embrace alternatives, such as second-hand shopping, upcycling, and supporting eco-friendly brands. Perhaps some of us might even embrace nudity as an alternative to clothes. Addressing the environmental impact of buying new clothes requires a paradigm shift in consumer behavior and industry practices. Our choices in clothing can reflect the principles of degrowth, and are one way we can choose a more just world.