At seven and a half in the evening, BASE Milano main room is overwhelmed by people. And it continues to arrive. Everyone is here to see a lecture about data visualization. I think: well, the times are finally changing in Italy and Meet The Media Guru, like it or not, has contributed significantly to it over the past 10 years. At the same time, I think that beyond the great work of Maria Grazia Mattei and her staff, it is clear that the guest in question is not quite a common designer: and surely Giorgia Lupi is not.
Giorgia Lupi likes to define herself as an “information designer”: with her company Accurat she works in the field of data visualization for companies, organizations, cultural and artistic projects of various kinds. What characterizes Giorgia’s work, which inevitably attracted my attention, is the almost magical balance between digital and analogue that guides her work. Complex data captured by algorithms and machine learning systems, accompanied by a “paper and pen” display. Almost infantile colors and shapes that seem to reflect the physicality of Giorgia, drawn with care and almost maniacally attention in their correspondence to the single figure, but whose result is pure poetry.
Or magic. Because in the presentation I attended the day before at ACIN (Accenture Customer Innovation Network), the new Milan hub (integrated in a global network with poles in Bangalore, Manila and Singapore) for open innovation led by Accenture and devoted to the worlds of retail, fashion and consumer goods, and the one at BASE, the true question that arises is: how is it possible to draw by hand given ephemeral data, a number, a value so precisely?
But it is not all about technicism, on the contrary: Giorgia Lupi‘s true magic is to make the technical aspect less interesting than the poetry that lies underneath it, or anyway, less present. That, as you may agree, has more critiques from the art world than from design: at least, following those disciplinary borders that today no longer have reason to exist. Giorgia uses the technique to talk about life: she uses the digital to narrate the real. She called it Data Humanism, the ability to associate data with people who generate them, with their behaviors and habits: data considerated as a narrative element, which can be represented with a strongly creative element of immediate impact, such as drawing. This may be the case for viewing and interpreting the Amazon database (Amazon’s Data Like To Life, for the Fast Company Innovation by Design Awards Conference), in an IBM consulting, for an artistic project such as the collaboration with Kaki King (A Dialogue between Four Hands), or as part of a very personal life project like the beautiful Dear Data.
This is the project that has made Giorgia Lupi famous worldwide, an incredible work of visualizing personal data, almost intimate, able to tell ordinary life situations of two designers, Giorgia and Stefanie Posavec. Day by day, for a year, the two girls have drawn their lives on postcards, sharing them across the ocean (Giorgia from New York and Stefanie from London), getting to know each other more and more, slowly and gradually, in order to collect their works in a 300-page book, published by the Princeton Architectural Press in the United States and by Particular Books in Europe. And, for those of you who do not know yet, the original collection of postcards and sketches is now part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York….
Marco Mancuso: Giorgia Lupi, information designer and artist: I am interested in knowing more about your background and what has led you to information design.
Giorgia Lupi: I have always been a collector. When I was a kid I would spend an incredible amount of time collecting and organizing all kind of items into transparent folders that I would then tag with maniacal care.
