Giorgia Lupi, partner at Pentagram and designer of capsule collection with & Other Stories, Photo ... [+]
Giorgia Lupi and her unique talent are at the intersection where data and design collide.
You might wonder where that crossroads can be found, as the spectrums of creative and calculating vary so greatly.
Here’s a clue: Lupi is a data visualization specialist and artist, who has made waves in the world of branding, on the TED Talk stage (her talk “How we can find ourselves in data” boasts over one million views, and counting), and now as design agency Pentagram’s newest partner. Even more impressive, she is Pentagram’s first new partner in seven years.
Named one of Fast Company's “100 Most Creative People in Business” in 2018, Lupi’s approach to data is unlike anything the world has ever seen: it’s artistic, poetic and most importantly, human. While most of us view data in black and white, Lupi sees shades of gray – and many spectrums of color in between.
As a creative born in 1981 who straddles both the analog and digital worlds, Lupi designs engaging visual narratives that re-connect numbers to what they stand for: people, ideas and stories.
So it’s only fitting that Lupi collaborated with global retailer & Other Stories, which is a label under the H&M Group, to design a capsule collection that launched last week, celebrating three trailblazing women in science and technology: the Mathematician (Ada Lovelace, the first computer programmer), the Conservationist (Rachel Carson, whose work spearheaded the environmentalist movement) and the Astronaut (Mae Jemison, the first woman of color in space).
The curated collection of ready-to-wear items features Lupi’s hand-drawn prints, inviting us to discover her process of giving data a human touch while uncovering the amazing achievements of these three remarkable women who paved the way for other women in STEM.
It turns out, the brand name “& Other Stories” and the talent of fashion design are both on-brand for Lupi. For starters, she looks at data as a narrative: it’s less about analyzing numbers and more about telling stories.
Through her designs that resemble map-like legends (each symbol and color corresponding to a different variable or piece of information), Lupi is passionate about transforming data into something that can be felt – and about focusing on the nuances that a computer can’t gather.
As she explains in her TED Talk, data is void of context, empathy and imperfection. “If we miss the deeper stories, we’re missing the big picture. We need to consider data as the beginning of the conversation, and not the end. Don’t take it at face value. Because data alone will never give us a solution.”
Lupi has always been fueled by curiosity, grace and her signature style, and her passion for design and fashion can be traced back to her childhood, in Italy:
“I think back to when I was a child and I can say in retrospect — not that I knew it back then — but I used to spend a lot of time in my grandmother’s tailor shop. She was a seamstress, and my favorite pastime was organizing all her ribbons, buttons and threads, according to my rules of colors and sizes, and whether a button had one or two holes. So in a way, I already took a lot of pleasure in visually organizing information, at that point.” Both of her grandmothers were seamstresses, and the one she recalls spending most of her time with, served as her muse.
Giorgia Lupi, during the design process of her collaboration with & Other Stories, Photo Credit: ... [+]
While Lupi always loved drawing, she sees herself as an information designer, “meaning that every day I shape the way that people – both my clients and their final customers – interact with information.”
Data visualization is a subset of information design, which is a broader discipline.
She explains: “Think of data visualization as a way of building patterns in any type of project, and generally designing new ways of how people think and interact with information systems. All my work focuses on reclaiming the personal and hopefully the more human relationship with data. And I do so by means of creating experiences that most of the time, are visual experiences.”
In other words, data visualization is the actual representation of data points through images.
“Imagine that data can be many things: they can be big, small, qualitative, or quantitative. Combine them all together, and a data visualization is a true representation of what's in the data, providing the key or the legend for people to understand it, and how to visually interpret this data.”
Giorgia Lupi during the design process of her capsule collection with & Other Stories, The Astronaut ... [+]
After Lupi received her master’s degree in Architecture, she earned her PhD in Design at Politecnico di Milano.
She is the co-author of Dear Data, an aspirational hand-drawn data visualization book that explores the more slippery details of daily life through data, revealing the patterns that inform our decisions and affect our relationships, and of the new interactive book Observe, Collect, Draw - A Visual Journal, aimed at helping readers discover the patterns in their everyday lives.
In 2011, Lupi co-founded Accurat, an internationally renowned data-driven design firm with offices in Milan and New York. While there, Lupi gained acclaim for building rich, visually-driven experiences around data for clients such as IBM, Google and Starbucks. On the design front, her work is part of the permanent collection of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum as well as the Museum of Modern Art, where she was commissioned to create an original, site-specific piece in 2017.
At Pentagram, Lupi will be focusing on projects such as brand activations and corporate earning reports.
“I will be building on the experiences that I developed over the years, which I’ve been working on at Accurat, and I will further explore how to blend visual design with the sensibility towards soft and hard data into new ways of communication, and into new ways of doing branding, digital experience, and more.”
As a thought leader and force in the realm of art and technology, Lupi’s human approach to data is sure to impact how brands work with data, and what we learn about each other – and ourselves.
“One of the things that I really want to pursue with my work is beauty and elegance and aesthetic. Creating beautiful artifacts out of data and experimenting with aesthetic that hopefully can speak to us as humans – this moves me.”
