We regret to inform you that this event needs to be postponed due to a work-related emergency experienced by Giorgia Lupi. It will be rescheduled ASAP. We will circulate the new date as it becomes available.
A presentation on visualization of information by Giorgia Lupi
DATE TO BE RESCHEDULED 6:30-8:30pm (Feliciano School of Business Lecture Hall 101)
Moderated by Teresa Fiore (Inserra Chair in Italian and Italian American Studies) with opening remarks by Yasemin Besen-Cassino (Sociology Dept. Chair) and closing remarks by Denis Feigler (Industrial Design Program Coordinator, Art and Design Dept.)
ADDITIONAL EVENT: MEETING WITH SELECT STUDENTS AND FACULTY (TBD)
An award-winning information designer, Giorgia challenges the impersonality of data, designing visual narratives that re-connect numbers to what they stand for: stories, people, ideas. Through her professional and artistic practice over the years, which blends science and the humanities. she has learned that data not only can describe the objective world, but it can especially grasp and illustrate aspects of our life that we hardly associate with numbers. In fact, data is not only a collection of facts, such as numbers, words, measurements or observations, but – most interestingly – a powerful lens we can use to filter every situation or analyze our reality according to specific aspects every time.
Educated in Italy, Lupi has produced work for Italian museums, newspapers, and fashion brands, as well as foreign companies also based in Italy, such as Starbucks in Milan. Among various projects, she will discuss an art installation in the main hall of the Triennale Design Museum in Milan. “…Ma poi, che cos’è un nome?” (… But what’s a name, after all?), a data wallpaper visualizing data from the 1938 census, which was the first direct discriminatory act made against the Jews on a national scale by the Italian Fascist regime. The original visual narrative she created with Accurat was able to quantify the magnitude of the act, and at the same time highlighted singular stories and life experiences.
Giorgia Lupi was born in Italy and received her Master’s Degree in architecture at Università di Ferrara and her Doctorate in Design at Politecnico di Milano, where she focused on information mapping. In 2011, she co-founded Accurat, an acclaimed data-driven research, design and innovation firm with offices in Milan and New York. She joined Pentagram as a partner in 2019.
At Accurat, Lupi built rich, visually driven experiences around data for clients including IBM, Google, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Starbucks, United Nations, World Health Organization, Triennale Milano Design Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, World Economic Forum, Knight Foundation, LVMH Group, Gucci, Valentino, Target, JPMorgan Chase, Unicredit Group, Columbia University, University of California Berkeley, TED, Corriere della Sera, Scientific American, Popular Science, and Wired. She has been honored with numerous awards, including multiple gold medals at the Kantar Information Is Beautiful Awards in 2013, 2014 and 2015, a Bronze Lion at the Cannes Festival of Creativity in 2013, and the “Lezioni di Design” Prize at Milan’s Design Week in 2016. She was named one of Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative People in Business in 2018, and recently joined MIT Media Lab as a Director’s Fellow. She is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on New Metrics.
Her work has been exhibited at the Design Museum, the Science Museum, and Somerset House in London; the Centre Pompidou in Paris; the Museum of Design in Atlanta; the New York Hall of Science and the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York; at the Triennale Design Museum and the Design Week in Milan; and at the Petach Tikva Museum of Art in Israel, among others. She has been featured in international media including The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Washington Post, NPR, CBC, BBC, Time magazine, Business Insider, Forbes, National Geographic, Scientific American, Popular Science, Wired, Flash Art, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Monocle, Print, Creative Review, Fast Company, El Pais and Corriere della Sera. Her TED Talk on her humanistic approach to data has over one million views. She has published two books, Dear Data (Princeton Architectural Press, 2016), exploring the details of daily life through hand-drawn visual data; and Observe, Collect, Draw! A Visual Journal (Princeton Architectural Press, 2018), a guided journal for collecting visual data.
- Organized by the Inserra Chair in Italian and Italian American Studies, in collaboration with the Italian Program (Dept. of Modern Languages and Literatures), the Art and Design Dept. (Product Design and Visual Communication Design) and the Sociology Dept. (graduate degree in social research and analysis and graduate certificate in data collection and management).
Resources
The New Yorker article: “Can Data Be Human?: The Work of Giorgia Lupi. By Alexandra Lange (May 25, 2019)
Giorgia Lupi’s TedTalk
Starbucks project in Milan (video)
Giorgia Lupi’s projects
Dear Data project and book
Photo credit: © Vito Maria Grattacaso / LUZ (thumbnail on calendar page), Ted Talk and Azure (on this page).
Alternative address for this page: https://tinyurl.com/LupiMSU