The Data We Do Not See: An Interview with Giorgia Lupi
Giorgia Lupi is an award-winning information designer. She recently became a partner at Pentagram, their only one specializing in data visualization. Her portfolio is vast, stunning and hard to summarize. She co-created the books Observe, Collect, Draw! and Dear Data with her friend and fellow designer Stefanie Posavec. Her work is part of the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and currently part of the Nature-Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial at the Smithsonian Design Museum. Her TED Talk on data humanism has been viewed over 1.2 million times. Her list of installations, talks, and clients is longer than we can list in an introduction. One can say she’s been busy…
JF: You really don’t need to introduce yourself, but let’s start by telling us who you are and your relationship to the Data Visualization Society(DVS)? GL: My name is Giorgia Lupi and I define myself as an information designer. In 2011 I co-founded a company called Accurat that has offices in Milan, Italy, which is my country, and in New York where I moved seven years ago. I joined Pentagram, which is a design firm with offices in New York, London, Austin, and Berlin as one of the partners in the New York office, and I’m excited about this new chapter! I probably joined the Data Visualization Society later than I should have. When DVS started I was kind of really just overwhelmed by the transition to Pentagram and I was like, I don’t want any more Slacks so for the moment, but I’m happy to be on board now! AB: Why do you introduce yourself as an information designer? Where does that come from? GL: I think that definitions blur the boundaries from data visualization designer to information designer. I feel like they’re still very subjective. But I like to call myself as an information designer because I like to think of what I do as giving people access to information and shaping the way that people (as readers, or users of an application, or visitors of a show) access information. So that’s why I prefer information design rather than data visualization. I feel that there’s a broader experiential component that starts before collecting the data and visualizing data. It’s really envisioning how the different context, goals, and audiences will access information.
JF : It’s interesting that you use that role because when people think about data visualization, there are these kinds of basic chart styles — you know, bar and line charts — but your work speaks to visualizing information in a different way. How did you evolve past these basic chart styles? GL: Yeah, I mean it’s interesting. I am an architect as my background, so I really never formally studied data visualization or computer science. I approached the world of representing information by thinking about what the numbers and data represent as opposed to focusing on the charts that are already available. With my work, I try not to use standard charts. Well, I mean, I’m not against using these charts at all. But what I’m exploring is how to start from what I have to work with at the moment, instead of starting from what the conventions are that have already been defined — such as a bar chart, a radar chart, a timeline. So if the data that I’m collecting or that I’m working with doesn’t necessarily fit a bar chart, I don’t want it to fit a bar chart, I want to fit the design the best way to represent the realities and the stories that are embedded in the visualization. Many times the projects that I work on are really dense and rich with information. The charts cannot embed all the richness of the information that I want to convey. So the question was how I came to go beyond standard charts, but I think I’ve never sought to use a standard chart at all!
AB: You touched on the “richness” of your work, both of the data and how you choose to represent it. One of the questions we wanted to ask was that you seem to often rely heavily on an elaborate legend.
