This proof of concept, which is a side project from a Netflix data engineer, needs to find its way into real stores.

Tell me if this is familiar: You go to Target or Costco, just to buy a couple of things. Some shampoo. Bananas if they're ripe. Then you go to check out and somehow you've spent $180. You stare at the receipt. It adds up–but where did your money go? If only the receipt itself visualized our spending better than listing numbers alone!

[Photo: courtesy Susie Lu]

A new concept by designer Susie Lu does just that. At her day job, Lu is a senior data visualization engineer at Netflix. In her spare time, she both paints landscapes and draws a hilarious comic. With her other spare time, over the course of several months, she's been working on rethinking the way we shop. Today, a receipt is nothing but a piece of paper most of us throw away. But if it could actually be designed to explain our purchases, it could teach us to shop more mindfully over time.