The Shape of Dreams for Google Trends

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In 2018 I was contacted by Google News Lab and Google Trends to design a data visualization project using Google data as base: I was asked to propose a topic to be explored.

I decided to visualize how people look for the meaning of their dreams on Google.

The result is the interactive storytelling piece The Shape of Dreams, designed by me and developed by Paolo Corti.

A project by Federica Fragapane

🎐 Instagram: instagram.com/federicafragapane

🔖 Twitter: twitter.com/fedfragapane

Team

Concept, analysis, design and illustrations Federica Fragapane

Development Paolo Corti

Google Trends Alberto Cairo & Simon Rogers

In order to find a story I’ve started to play with Google Trends, using different queries and exploring the results. I’ve discovered that typing incomplete questions such as “what does it mean to dream about…” the Related queries section provided interesting results, as for instance: what does it mean to dream about flying? or what does it mean to dream about snakes?

I decided to design a website that would have allowed to explore the dream topic from 4 different points of view: they became the 4 chapters of our project.

For each chapter there are two macro-sections: READ THE STORY, with some of the insights found and EXPLORE THE DREAMS with an interactive visualization that would have allowed the readers to play with the results.

You can read more about the design process here!

Chapter 1 — The Shapes of our Dreams. How do we search for the meaning of our dreams on Google? We have explored the related queries to the question What does it mean to dream about in different languages to see which dream subjects users look for most. We discovered that we share some recurring dreams.

Chapter 2 — The Worlds We Dream of. What are the worlds we dream of the most according to Google searches? After exploring the subjects, we created some macro-categories of dreams to see what are the universes that populate our sleep and how they change according to the different languages over the years.

Chapter 3 — A Time for Dreams. How does the interest for the meaning of certain dreams change over time? We also explored the dreams topic from this point of view, studying the trends throughout the years and we found different types of subjects.

Chapter 4 — Dreams that connect us. Another aspect we were interested in was exploring the networks of dreams: how do the dream subjects – whose meaning people look for on Google – connect different languages? For this reason we visualized the dreams that connect us by year.

I worked on the mobile and desktop version as two sides of the same project: I kept the same structure in both the versions, but I worked on the potentials of both of them for a fluid navigation.

As final touches I added a set of illustrations for some of the Read sections. I love drawing and using illustrations as additional communicative elements. Here I illustrated some of the mentioned dream subjects to add warmth to the project.