Photos + Demographic Data = Useful ?

January 23, 2009 11:56 AM

I have thousands of photographs of the insides of closets, refrigerators, cabinets, medicine chests, etc., all of which have a decent amount of demographic data attached to each photo. It sure seems like this data would be useful to some product research firm, or manufacturer, or product developer. Is it? Do any of those companies ever buy datasets like this?
posted by ericc to Work & Money (3 answers total)

That's a really neat idea. Please be careful with regard to selling photos of people's medicine chests. Medical privacy laws are tricky, and it would suck to get in trouble because someone's name and medication types are visible in your photos.

As to your question more directly, I would imagine that it's go to be of value to someone. Architects/builders, maybe? Knowing how people use those spaces might help them to design better ones.
posted by DWRoelands at 12:21 PM on January 23, 2009

How (and why) did you get these photos? If your sample selection is biased/not rigorous enough, I don't know how much value it has. Normally the study design comes first, dataset later when you know your paramaters.

However, I think it has the makings of a fantastic web-based art project.
posted by aquafortis at 12:31 PM on January 23, 2009 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Please be careful with regard to selling photos of people's medicine chests.

Great point. I hadn't thought of that.

If your sample selection is biased/not rigorous enough, I don't know how much value it has.

It's all self-reported data, so there's that limitation, but if you're interested in seeing what the closet of an African-American male, 25-34 y/o, living in the Northeast (just as a random example) looks like, I can show you 20 different versions. Even as self-reported data, that still seems useful.

it has the makings of a fantastic web-based art project.

That's definitely my back-up plan.
posted by ericc at 12:46 PM on January 23, 2009