Yoshi Torralva-Looking Outwards-01

Pentagram’s newest design partner, Giorgia Lupi, is at the forefront of furthering data-driven design as an essential pillar to design methods. Throughout Lupi’s career, she has used data as the foundation to nurture empathy towards important issues surrounding politics, technology, health, and above all, forging impactful human interactions.

TED conferences are renowned for showcasing inspiring speakers that span all over the world. When one is privileged with the opportunity to attend an event, it lends itself numerous networking opportunities. For many, the process of becoming comfortable with networking is often a hurdle. What Giorgia Lupi accomplishes is making the barrier to transgress from surface-level introduction to meaningful conversations easier through generative conference ID tags. This project included Giorgia Lupi and David Stark Design for Targets interaction space at the 2017 TED Conference in Vancouver. A timespan of the development process is not provided, but I would predict it took a couple of months.

Giorgia Lupi creates a system of different hand-drawn symbols, colors, and accents that identified someone’s personality or interests. Although these ID’s provide personability to a tag, it would be lengthy to replicate. Lupi decided to implement her hand-drawn style into an app that auto-generated the ID after filling out a survey. The app itself uses a stock Google Material design to input the person’s data. However, visual elements are of separate layers to that morph at the end of the survey. It would have been nice for these visual elements to be computer-generated as it could be replicated at other conferences. These data-driven ID tags are inspired by physical ID labels and added fabric ribbons that might supply information like location and name. What this tag does is employ visualized data to allow for more interactions among participants. Giorgia Lupi sets the framework for ID’s to become more diverse in information through an auto-generative ID system. An intervention like this sets the standard for other conferences and corporate companies to create ID systems that nurture insightful relationships right after the first hello.