Rachel Lee Looking Outwards 08

Eyeo 2018 – Giorgia Lupi from Eyeo Festival on Vimeo.

Giorgia Lupi is an Italian, New York based information designer and entrepreneur who aspires to create compelling visual narratives that challenge the stereotype of impersonal data. Lupi studied architecture at FAF in Ferrara, Italy, before completing her PHD in design at Milan Politecnico. Her body of work is based on a sole kind of medium, rather, her work traverses the boundaries of digital, print and handcrafted representations, but rather, she uses whatever drawing medium is appropriate to best represent data. Something that I really admire about Lupi and her body of work is how she treats each data analytics case as a blank canvas, and creates a unique visual language for the dataset at hand. I also admire how she is able to visualise numbers in a way that is compelling by creating narratives, storylines, and humanising the data. Something that strikes me as very impressive is how data can be meaningful.

One project that I was really captivated was Dear Data, a project done in collaboration with Stefanie Posavec, a fellow information designer. The two were previously strangers, but were able to cultivate a friendship and tell a story about each other via weekly postcard ‘reportings’ regarding details of their daily lives. While I typically think that numbers and data are quite boring, the result of this project was a creative, engaging and intimate experience that documented the seemingly endless multifaceted aspects of two people’s lives.

Throughout Lupi’s talk, I really enjoyed her use of hand drawn screen transitions that speak to the body of her work, and how she dissects each case study of her project to discuss the brief, the collaborative efforts, process and physical products. Learning about the way in which data was interpreted and the integration of her visual voice into her presentation ultimately made for an effective presentation.