Bonus Episode: Design As Recovery with Pentagram’s Giorgia Lupi

In this bonus episode of Design As, renowned information designer Giorgia Lupi shares her deeply personal journey through Long Covid and how it inspired a groundbreaking design approach featured in The New York Times.

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Renowned information designer and Pentagram partner Giorgia Lupi takes listeners on a deeply personal journey through her unique data visualization work, inspired by her ongoing recovery from Long Covid. Three and a half years and two subsequent infections later, Lupi’s recovery was the catalyst for an influential data visualization project recently published as a Visual OpEd in the New York Times. Following Lupi’s presentation, “Design for Recovery”, she will discuss her work in conversation with Lee Moreau, Professor of the Practice of Art + Design at Northeastern University College of Arts, Media and Design and host of Design As. This audio was recorded live at the Design Research Society 2024 Conference hosted in Boston in June 2024.

Images courtesy of Giorgia Lupi

See her stunning graphics and slides come to life in this one-of-a-kind presentation. Click play below or watch now on our YouTube channel.

Transcript

Lee Moreau Welcome to Design As a show that’s intended to speculate on the future of design from a range of different perspectives. I’m Lee Moreau. This season, we’re bringing you six new episodes with six new keywords to interrogate. And this is the first of our two bonus episodes. As you’ve been hearing so far, we recorded this season at the Design Research Society’s conference in Boston. So in addition to our roundtables, we wanted to get you exclusive access to recordings from the conference itself. In this bonus episode, you’ll hear my conversation with Giorgia Lupi, information designer and a partner at Pentagram, who you just heard in our previous episode, Design As Care. We talked about her personal design practice, which I think has broad implications in the craft and the way we think about information design. And I think that in a world that’s changing so quickly, the value of creating different approaches like Giorgia’s to design is important. As you know, technical domains are advancing, things are moving really fast. This is just a different approach because we want more than just a one size fits all way of looking at the world. Also, you’ll hear some references to the visuals on screen. We were able to get those from Giorgia, so if you want the full experience, you can listen and even watch this episode, as you can all of our episodes, on our YouTube channel. Now, here’s my conversation with Giorgia Lupi. 

Lee Moreau Please welcome Giorgia Lupi. /applause/

Giorgia Lupi Thanks so much, Lee, for the intro. I’m really excited to be here. This is a wonderful theater. So my name is Giorgia. I’m from Italy originally, but I’ve been living in New York for the past 13 years. And the title of this portion of the conference is Design for Recovery. And I’ll get to the last project I’m going to show you, which really has to do with the topic. But to begin with, I want to give you a sense of what I do, how I do it and why I think it’s interesting. I define myself as an information designer, and that means that every day with my team, I shape and design the different ways that my clients and their clients access different kinds of information. And specifically in my case, data. So data that can be qualitative or quantitative, big or small, data that organization already have or actually that most of the time it’s crafted by myself and my team in collaboration with our clients. And data that we then represent visually, translating numbers into images through data visualization and through building interactive experiences with these visualizations. I’m a partner at Pentagram, which is the largest independent agency, design agency, made of 23 partners. I joined as a partner five years ago in the New York office, and Pentagram is traditionally known for brand identity design. And so logos and word marks, but also packaging, editorial design, book design exhibitions. Maybe you recognize some of these logos that are designed by my partners. So what I introduced with my team is data as one of the tools, the material, that we have to express a story, a brand, a content in the physical space and more. And really data is a design tool for me. It is my favorite design material. And the thing that you can do are quite cool from a design perspective with data, I think. But also data, it’s more than that to me. Personal data is also my way of seeing the world. A bit of an obsession, if you will. It’s a lens, a filter, that I use to make sense of reality one subject at a time. And through my life, I’ve been using data as my way to understand, to see better so many times. And this obsession apparently started pretty early in life. In retrospect, I’ve always been a data collector. So when I was a kid, my favorite pastime was going to my grandmother’s tailor shop, she was a seamstress, and meticulously reorganize her tools. So buttons, threads, ribbons and so on according to a different principle every day. For example, if a button had two holes or four holes, the length of ribbons and their colors — and my grandmother was not thrilled. But-but I had a lot of fun. And also my mom a couple of years ago reminded me that when I was probably 8 or 10 years old, I used to chart boys that I liked. This is actually a screenshot that she sent me where she was cleaning up old paper folders. So it’s a very simple chart here. There are four- there are four boys that are actually apparently I was interested in at the same time that I ranked everyday on a scale of 1 to 10. So each horizontal square is one day for the month. Kind of imprecise, I have to say, but I got the point. Poor Roberto, who was in-attractive at some point here. And on a similar topic a few years ago, so jumping forward in time, I used it as my form of journaling and understanding in a time when I started dating after a breakup, after a ten year long relationship, I really felt the urge to track and understand through this lens what was going on, my expectations, what I wanted, what I liked in the process. It was really clarifying to me and it looks from this spreadsheet that I’ve dated like hundreds of men. But no, it’s just that those are dense notes for each individual date and really almost my form of journaling in this organized way, if you will. And this personal documentation obsession of mine sometimes leads to something that I actually make. This is an example where I’ve been asked by Moleskine to use one of their notebooks as a material to reflect on the topic of time and then donate back the notebook to support the mission of the foundation to inspire young people. So I decided to use a notebook to reflect on my life so far. I disassembled three whole Moleskine notebooks and then reassemble them in an accordion that I counted and divided up all the pages into 14,496 tallies, one for each day of my life on Earth until the moment I was delivering the piece. So tallies that I first punch to all for each one. And then individually I stitch with white almost imperceptible thread, and I have no idea what I signed up when I got excited about these concept, I was stitching pretty much everywhere on my spare time, evenings and weekends in the car for many months. But then on top of this white stitches that were marking the days I made second stitches using color-colored threads that individually marked important moment for me. So stitching the data set of my life as I wanted to remember it on top of it. Moments that I either just remembered or I previously noted from a different data collection from my first words, when my mom told me that, my first love from important achievement to health scares, from losses in my family to moving and here are some of the pages. And the final results is a visual archive of my memory that has been traveling in various exhibition, but more than a definitive view of my life, I think it’s a way to start a conversation about it. So, for example, you know, people might ask:what is the red point there? What happened? How do you remember it? So I started to have a conversation, which I think all data is in the end. I’ve also used personal data collection and visualization to get to know another  person that I didn’t know before in a project that we called Dear Data. Another data visualization designer, her name is Stefanie Posavec, lives across the Atlantic in London, and I only met her once at a conference like this one in 2013 before the project. So I didn’t know here. And so for Dear Data every week and for one year we used our personal data to get to know each other. Personal data around weekly shared mundane topics from our thoughts and ideas to our most intimate feelings, from our belongings to our apologies and laughters. And personal data that then we would manually hand-draw on a postcard sized sheet of paper that every week was sent from London to New York, where I live, and from New York to London, where she lives for one entire year. The front was always the data drawing pretty elaborate, and the back of the poster contained the address of the other person and the legend, how to read our drawings. This was real laborious, even more than the Moleskine. So every postcard was unique. And in our daily data collection, we didn’t only quantify the number of time that we did a certain thing, for example, not only quantifying the number of complaints in this example where here the theme of the week was complaints, but instead really adding context and details about why, what was happening, what was the situation of the feeling, was the complain necessary and so on — what was it about? So really realizing week after week, how to put ourself in those numbers and realizing the importance of adding qualitative aspects to make this data truly representative of our selves, creating this intimate portrait of our self to share with the other person through this invisible layer of data. So Dear Data got actually pretty viral unexpectedly, and the original collection of the postcards, have found the most exciting home as they’ve been acquired as part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, which has been quite nice. But what excited us even more is that Dear Data has been so well received from the public outside the data community. We’ve seen thousands of postcards made by people who are not even designer or artist who learned about the project and wanted to experiment on themselves. And even teachers of any grades are using this format to teach their students the world of data and also to teach, you know, a way to tell their own unique personal story. And I think you’ve seen so far, the data can be a warm and human material to tell stories if it’s thought of and used the right way. Because what is data? We often think of data as cold numbers and algorithms, and there’s certainly that. But fundamentally, data is an abstraction of our reality, our activities, the context in which we perform that, an abstraction that we can use to pass our reality one subject at a time to see better. But to do so, we really have to embrace its most fundamental human qualities. These that you see here is a visual manifesto that I’ve made a few years ago that still guide my design work. I started to call what I do data humanism, where we see data for what they really are, representation of our imperfect and different lives, where we embrace their context and the fact that there is not an absolute truth, but rather an interesting explorative tool. But coming to the topic of today, I believe that, again, the main reason I’m on this stage is to show you this next project which started with personal data collection again. It’s, as Lee mentioned, the visual op-ed I publish in the New York Times last December about my journey with long COVID. So long COVID, if you’re not familiar with it, it’s an umbrella term that describes the very various health consequences that some people have after an acute COVID infection or re-infection. It can be mild and it can pass in a few months, or it can be extremely debilitating and disabling and leave you unable to attend the basic tasks of your daily life for years. Long COVID can be mild and can pass in a few months, or it can also be really extremely debilitating and disabling and again, really leaving you unable to attend your life. So since my first COVID infection in 2020, and especially so after my re-infection in 2022, I started to develop constant, debilitating and disabling symptoms. These are some of the pictures that I took at times during this journey, both at home and in the many, many medical settings I’ve been on. And at my worst in my journey, I was housebound and pretty much bedbound for months and it’s been extremely hard and challenging and for a few months I even had to stop working, which has been really the hardest for me. As I started to develop these undiagnosed symptoms of course I started to log data, so tracking the daily symptoms that my body was going through, such as extreme fatigue, dizziness, double vision, head pressure, nerve pain, heart palpitation, tinnitus, constant flu like symptoms and many more. Logging them together with the treatments I was trying, there’s no known cure for long COVID, so doctors are really trying to help you. But again, it’s all a trial and error. I’ve been logging biometrics for the smartwatch that I used to wear, what I was eating and the general activities that I was doing, such as walking, commuting, and even the level of my stress. And I did it to understand possible correlation and help me and my doctors crack this mystery, but also to keep me sane in a moment of real uncertainty. And again, this is just a little snapshot of four years of collecting data. And at a certain point in my journey, I felt that I needed to share what I collected with people. In fact, when you read about long COVID, you usually read a list of symptoms that for the weight of they’re put pen to paper. I think that a healthy person might think: Oh well, I’m tired too after work, I have headaches as well, yeah, I had COVID a couple of weeks ago and I’m still fatigued, but I’ve never seen a thorough account that describes what it means to live with a disabling condition like this on a daily basis. So I decided to share my journey. I put together a piece for editorial project to send to different newsrooms, so I shared what my goals were for the piece, to showcase what it really looks like primarily and feels like to live with a chronic illness primarily, but together with some other points about how serious the disease is and the research that is still needed for it. In the piece I also, of course, shared how I imagined data to be the center of the story. The data that I already explained to you that I collected, and adding that medical images of my many, many tests could be included. This is an example of my blood under a microscope where these fluorescent spots here represent micro clots in neutrophil nets in my blood. And for a healthy person, the whole thing would look pitch black so you wouldn’t really see anything forming. I thought we could also include snippets from my journals, even from the hardest moment where I truly didn’t know if I could do this anymore. And I included what I thought the main visual language to represent in my years of symptoms could be individual brush strokes, marking the days passing filled with these colored elements. And why paint brushes? Primarily because I started to paint these abstract and angry compositions at times during my journey as a way to soothe myself and release emotions, but also because this repetitive language that feels warm and imperfect felt right to counter the constant fluctuations of symptoms and the uncertainty about the future. And I set to include a sketch of what I imagined the flow to be for what became an interactive long scroll, so a digital long scroll. From the beginning opening to the interaction with the text that could tell my story in words, together with data visualization. And you’ll see the final piece in a second. And finally, I always thought that the piece was going to be about my story to open with as well as, you know, to make it as a personal, relatable account. But it should include snippets of stories of other people dealing with long COVID And so this is a sample of a Google form that I created asking people from the Long COVID community to respond to one simple prompt: I hope I will be able to — blank — again. So I pitched it to The Guardian, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. And surprisingly for me, all the three publications wanted to publish it. But when I heard from Jeremy, the graphics director for the opinion of The New York Times, I felt in my gut that it needed to be published there. I really loved the way that they didn’t give me any boundaries for the interactivity that I could use. So a few months of work and 87 hours of fact checking later, wepublished it. It’s been a crazy, intense fact checking process where, again, incredible fact checkers from The New York Times talk to my doctors, went through my medical records, my bills and checked every word that I put on paper. Like when you say dizzy, what do you really mean? To the point that I’m like: Yeah, it’s just that. Anyway, I I’m really glad that they did it. But so with my team and Pentagram, we design and develop the whole visual narrative that I’m about to show you. The piece starts with caller brushes, as I mentioned, that surrounds the title 1347 Days: My Life with Long- COVID. As you start to scroll in, read the piece and you will scroll the essay, you start to understand that every color brushstroke represents a symptom. So purple for fatigue, pink for temperature dysregulation, greens for chills and so on. And you start to understand that the brush stroke aggregates by day. There is also in the piece a body figure that gets overwhelmed with the total amount and type of symptoms that I’ve experienced in the four years. And then, you know, you keep scrolling and you read the story, but after some scrolls, as you keep reading my story in words, you put it all together as you’ll see a calendar that starts in 2020 and keeps going until the end of 2023, which is the publication date that gets filled with this color brushstrokes and annotations that help you contextualize what happened, my vaccines, my re-infections, understanding that every single day some of us go through a litany of never ending symptoms and consequence hard and real limitation in our daily life. Ultimately, understanding that for some of us, really life changed dramatically after we got COVID. And on the calendar, there are additional symbols that represent everything else that I tracked. This is another part of the scrolling. When you start to see that there’s an actual account of the many doctors I saw, the several treatments I tried, they all specializations of tens of thousands of dollars I paid for my care and so on. And as the essay concludes, there’s a call to action for funds, for research and better awareness. But also what I shared for you before. Thousands of people from the Long COVID community will responded to that prompt, I hope I’ll be able to — again. And this white little paper is all filled with hopes from people who are dreaming of walking their dog again, playing with their children, get back to work or simply being independent and free again. And we concluded a collective hope that we could all start leaving with a blank canvas full of possibilities again. So I got very lucky and the Times offer me a full double spread in their Sunday printed opinion supplement last December. The piece has been acquired as part of the permanent collection of the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum, and I will even give a TED talk about the piece in September. This is admittedly a little bit of a preview of the first time that I actually talk about the piece in public. But the reason that I wanted to share this today is that the response to the piece has been incredible. Thousands and thousands of people living with chronic illnesses or caregivers of patients who messaged me and told me that for the first time they feel seen. They have something to send to their loved one and their friends to make them understand what they’re really going through. These are some quick snapshot of some of the comments and messages. But what also surprised me is that the piece moved doctors and researchers who like took the time to write me, most of them saying that they will rethink how they address their patients on a daily basis and in their studies. So I think data has the power to move people if we use them correctly. If we tell personal stories with them, and perhaps even if we render them in the right visual way design wise. Well, as for me, I’m doing better. At times people see me and see that I’m around and I look good and therefore they think that I’m cured. But unfortunately, this is a chronic illness, and it’s also called an invisible illness in a way. But I am doing better. I’m here, which is something to celebrate. And I do have hope. I still keep a spreadsheet, but since the beginning of this year, my spreadsheet is a different one. In fact, I’m trying only my progress, the things that I’m able to do. The little wins and victories. I’ve retired my smartwatch which truthfully, was only giving me bad news about my work, my health in terms of heart rate and so on. And these are my new main categories: what I was able to do everyday, movement that I was able to do, other wins, what I’ve been grateful for. These are some of my few wins that I know might look really small, such as going out to dinner with my partner, doing 15 minutes of gentle yoga, eat a dumpling without some of my preventive medications to avoid reactions, walking to the subway in the morning. So physical activity and exertions are still the biggest trigger for long lasting symptoms for me, which is sad as I’ve always been a pretty active person. But recently, together with the health coaches, is experts in chronic illnesses. I started to run again for lengths of time that may look ridiculous. 45 seconds every two, three days. Like you see here what I’ve shared my picture in a group chat of all the people, a few people focusing on their recovery and progress. But to conclude, I believe there’s a bigger message here for all kind of data and for all the kind of places we choose to put focus on in our lives. The data that we choose to look at or the bits of your life we choose to look at if you want don’t want to call them data, I think are the ones that ultimately tell us the stories that make us, us. And I do believe in my recovery. Now, it may be far away in time, but believing that it can happen and imagining it and visualizing it every day and focusing on the process and the progress, it’s the first step in that road, I think. So thank you. /applause/

Lee Moreau Wow. Amazing. Giorgia, how are you feeling? 

Giorgia Lupi I’m alright, thank you. Okay. 

Lee Moreau You know, it feels really good. A round of applause. Another round of applause /applause/ let’s hear it for Girogia Lupi. 

Giorgia Lupi Thank you. 

Lee Moreau I mean, that’s the nice thing to do. Thank you for that. 

Giorgia Lupi Thank you. Thank you. 

Lee Moreau So I want to lay some ground rules a little bit for Q&A. So we’re going to have approximately an hour here to chat with Giorgia. The students in my large format classes know this about me. I’ll bring index cards to class for moments like this. So you’ll find index cards here on the tables in front of you. If you have a question, particularly if it’s about recovery, please write it on the card. And there are ushers on the side who can pick them up. And we’re going to make this work and it’s going to be fine. We’ll pick them up halfway through the Q&A and I can pull them up here in the second half. So imagining you as a young data collector in your grandmother’s tailor studio, sorting buttons and ribbons and things like that. When did you become self-aware of yourself as a data collector and when did you think that it was okay to think of that as a proper vocation or something to do for your life? 

Giorgia Lupi Much later in life. Actually, like really much later in life, I, I not even until after college, to be honest. I studied architecture and at the time architecture for me was sort like similar to data visualization. I didn’t know that data visualization was a thing, but architecture for me was a way to merge like scientific rules, numbers or some ground that felt, again, a little scientific with creative expression in the end. When you think about an architectural building, you design the flow of the people. You design a fl-floor plan. So there was a certain amount of creativity in there. And like at the end of my architectural studies, I got really intrigued into urban mapping, which is in a way the science of mapping what’s going on in the city and planning. And that, I think, is where I really started to think of myself as a data person because I was really so interested in these layers of the city that you can use to analyze and then to plan the city one layer at a time. And then, of course, you think about it in retrospect and, you know, talking to my mom, then we were like, well, you know, yeah, I’ve always—

Lee Moreau  It was always there

Giorgia Lupi —been a data collector. Yeah.

Lee Moreau And you give yourself permission to continue doing that, which I think a lot of people would have said: Okay, you know, maybe this is not forever. Then this is I mean, because you take it to a level where it’s it’s a-it’s a style. It’s it’s-it’s a it’s it’s beyond just a technical thing. Like, it’s bordering on an art form. 

Giorgia Lupi Yeah. Well, I think like, getting back to even did a collection part. I mean I think throughout my life I’ve collected data but I felt that it was really, as I mentioned before, my form of journaling. I’m, I’m not a great writer. I don’t do well with writing, like writing the long COVID piece and writing the text for that was so much harder than designing the whole thing for me. So I think my way of being comfortable with writing is actually writing in Excel cells and just make it organized in a way that it doesn’t really have to be this like pure form of writing, but more jotting down thoughts that are already organized. And I think I also personally take a lot of pleasure and I’m soothed by having things organized and having things organized in that way. So I think like there’s the personal level to that, but then I think that progressively, again, I really thought about data as a new, really incredible tool to tell stories. And I feel that to me the visualizations is just the end part is very, very much about the stories that you want to tell and how you can craft, you know, quantitative information together with qualitative information to make people move and relate. And I mean, we can talk about that. 

Lee Moreau Yeah, we should. And there’s something about the work that you do that seems surprisingly meditative. So when you look at it in aggregate, all the work together, there’s something seemingly meditative — the project with for Moleskin, which means that- months of sewing and things like that. Is that a central part of your creative process and your design process? 

Giorgia Lupi Well, I feel again, it starts with the data collection because my data collections are very detailed and because I tend to over collect to the point that I want to have all of the data collected possible, then I think that everything that I do is kind of crazy laborious to be able to visualize the data that I collect, which are, again, admittedly a little too much. They’re obsessive. And I think that then you see that meditative quality probably because there’s just like constant repetition. But also a symbol is never just like a one little symbol. There’s extra details, extra layers of symbols for another type of category that I collect, like you’ve probably seen in the spread sheet for the Long COVID piece. So again, I think that the visuals are always a reflection of the data that I collect. 

Lee Moreau And for me it’s somewhere between meditative and also obsessive, right? 

Giorgia Lupi Yeah, I said it, you can say it.

Lee Moreau I mean, that’s remarkable, but you’re able to keep it going. So like in terms of recovery and, and the act of recording that data during this process of having long COVID, was that — almost obsession — something that helped keep you going just in the investment in that content? 

Giorgia Lupi It’s interesting because I feel that in the first part, again, I’m just collecting progress. It’s different but tracking daily symptoms up to a certain point in my health journey helped me have a semblance that at some point I could piece it all together and maybe that I’ll find a doctor that will see all my correlation and will have a aha moment. So I think it was my way to be like, I really care about these. I care about my recovery, I care about my health. I’m going to do everything that is in my ability to record these fluctuating symptoms. Because the truth is, then when you have just 15 minutes with a doctor and you have to recall everything that’s been going on for the past however many months, and when you see a new doctor, it made me feel just much more sane and secure and safe to have that account that I can just refer to. And at times I’ve also shared the spreadsheet with some of my doctors. And I remember in the beginning when I said in the very beginning, I actually would like print out my spreadsheet because it was still short enough in the first few months that you can print it out. But I’d go into a doctor’s office and I’d get these two types of reaction. The first one is like: This person’s completely crazy. 

Lee Moreau I was going to say, you sound like the worst patient ever. But yeah. 

Giorgia Lupi Or! But! The second reaction is, wow, if all my patients could be so organized, can I have the access to the actual spreadsheet? So, you know, I like this second kind of doctors better. 

Lee Moreau But I love this notion of you’re seeing your work in the world presumably for like the first time like: my God, somebody is reading my article. Here it is, can you talk about the reception of your work and how important that is in the kind of feedback. 

Giorgia Lupi And in terms of reaction to my work? Well, I know that my work is not for everybody. Probably my work is not for somebody that wants to just like flip a page and learn something in 10 seconds, I think it’s rich and it requires engagement. And I always make this example that it really depends on the goals. If I had to design a dashboard for a pilot to land a plane, I would never ask them to read a legend. I would do green and red and you know, that’s it. But like sometimes, especially when you’re in cultural settings, on a newspaper, in a museum, or when you can really have people’s time and attention, I think that a visualization shouldn’t be a simplification of the world, but it should be a way for people to access the different layers of complexity of the world. So that’s why sometimes it’s kind of intricate.

Lee Moreau The notion of nuance is very important to your work. When you show those animations of the op-ed, the kind of coverage over time of the document and like filling it up and that the gesture, right, is very much a part of the work. We don’t associate that typically with data visualization, right? 

Giorgia Lupi Yeah. 

Lee Moreau Talk about that. 

Giorgia Lupi Well I mean any nuances, I feel every data set pretty much should have nuances, and that getting back to what data is — I mean, data is primarily human made. And I know that people my rolling their eyes, but even if you think about it like even if it comes from a sensor, a human being designed to sensor and decided what to collect and what to leave out. So in a way, every dataset is subjective. And I think the more than it comes to personal data than is very individualized. And even if we have the same smartwatch that, you know, records to say, metrics, but the context of our lives are fundamentally different. What we care about in these like scores that we get every morning is very different. And I think that sometimes, again, especially when it comes to these type of data, the representation itself also should be nuanced. And I feel that, again, especially in this type of data, if you read like a very clear, graphically neat 52 versus 57 bar chart, you tend to think that that’s also the perfect reality and very precise. But again, rarely data are. And so that’s why when I can, I try to render it with visualization. 

Lee Moreau But sometimes when you’re operating in a world, I think, frankly, our world at times increasingly that that can’t process nuance. Things are black or white and talk about — what, what does your work do in a world of black and white? What is your world do in a world that can’t see those fuzzy edges anymore? 

Giorgia Lupi Well, I still think that my work is the colors in between. And I don’t-I don’t think that anything is for everybody. And I really know that that’s okay for me. And I’ve probably found my initial client and people that like my work. And also I think my work as everybody’s work is evolving and will evolve. And, you know, maybe we’ll come a time that will be a little bit more black and white, but I still find that I would like to find a place for colors. 

Lee Moreau And I use the word art earlier, so I’m sorry about that— 

Giorgia Lupi No, no, go ahead. 

Lee Moreau But can you talk about I know you like to self-identify as a designer, but the relationship between art and design, when I look at that work, it it really does blur the boundaries for me. 

Giorgia Lupi Yeah, I feel that in many times because I’ve been working on artistic commissions, you know, people say, you’re an artist. And I really don’t see myself as an artist. I see myself as a designer. I thrive with constraint that sometimes I give to myself. Even when the projects are mine, I thrive on collaboration. And I think, you know, all of my work, even if it looks like it’s me, like it’s rarely just me. It’s really like a team of people. And I really like working with clients. I love like being their partner in either solving the problems or telling their stories. And I also am somebody that really just doesn’t personally thrive in being at home alone with a blank canvas, I think, I really don’t. So for for all of these very individual reasons, I define myself as a designer. But you’re right. I mean, the boundaries are kind of fuzzy and sometimes the outputs are overlapping as well. So to me it is really more about the profession itself individually rather than, is this art or is is design necessarily. 

Lee Moreau You’re painting a picture of a person who would really not enjoy 1374 days in isolation and dealing with this. 

Giorgia Lupi Yes. 

Lee Moreau Can you talk about what that meant for you in particular? 

Giorgia Lupi Yeah. I mean, I’ve been miserable. Like I believe me, I am a very extraverted person. I used to be very active, very social out all the time. I mean, I live in New York and I love New York. And for a long time, I mean, I still have limitations. I can’t do everything that I want to do, but I’m here. I hang out with people. I have also stopped wearing a mask in public all the time. I wear a mask on public transportation. I have these sprays that I use when I’ll be in the middle of people because I don’t want to get reinfected. But also at some point I really I mean, for my mental health and possibly even for my recovery, I need to stop living like it was 2020, like in like a year ago. And so together with my partner, we’ve been deciding to like, okay, let’s let’s leave like that again. Let’s try to live again. But yeah, it’s been, it’s been absolutely traumatic and I still live with a lot of fear. And even if I’m here and, you know, I’m traveling to Boston and all of that, to be honest, every choice that I make might have consequences because one of the hardest things of this illness and disease is what it’s called post exertional malaise. And the word malaise doesn’t even start to make justice to what it is. Sometimes if you exert yourself too much or if you do something that again is too much for what you can handle at the moment, you can find yourself, make yourself being in bed unable to get up for months. So every choice is very, you know, needs for me to be weighted. And I think that this kind of trauma will probably stay with me for a long time. And I know I seem like a very cheerful person, and I and I and I think I am. But it’s been really, really hard. 

Lee Moreau Well, we do appreciate you being here. And I want to talk about data humanism and this sort of framework. I think when I look at the audience here after a couple of days, a lot of framework lovers here in the audience. Is there a framework lover here? There’s one person yesterday who like completely — yeah, it was you. Hi. She’s back. Hi. Okay, this is sort of a manifesto right? And, but it’s a delightful manifesto at the same time. And it you’re partly taking a world that I think for many of us, we think of data as really big and maybe scary looming. It’s certainly uncertain or it has been processed and you make it intimate and small. And can you talk about what-what that does both for your creative practice and more importantly as a manifesto, you’ve meant for that to extend to other people and for people to take hold of it creatively. 

Giorgia Lupi Yeah. So again, I, I started it for myself. It’s almost like after ten years of practice at that point, eight years of practice, I felt that I needed to systematize what I do and why I do it in a way. And I was asked to write an article in print magazine, a graphic design publication about my work, and I thought that that was going to be like a good moment to have like a start of some principle around it. And so I started to think about embracing complexity as one of the principles, but also, you know, embrace beauty and beauty. He has a beautiful access to like things that then can get to curious about a topic and all of that. And also the idea of going beyond standards because I rarely just rely on like, you know, bar charts and pie charts per say. And as I started to put down those principles, I thought that then there was something bigger that was maybe interesting for all kind of data. And especially in an age of big data and everything that gets processed electronically, like what Dear Data that project of the postcards taught me is really that to get closer to the very nature of data, maybe removing technology is something that is helpful because then it fundamentally comes down to the human questions that you want to ask to the data as opposed to what’s already there, what’s the writing form of a spreadsheet, what’s already been collected and processed. And of course that manifest as a bit of a provocation because I say small data versus big data, you know, but it’s just really to start to think about the very nature of data. And in terms of big and small, I don’t think that our brain can process big data. We are like human beings with a finite way of visualizing and processing dimensions. And so I think that in any case, starting with small, small data in small units, can give you a sense of what you can possibly have if you expand, especially as a designer, it can also help you find what I call like a visual model that is very customized for the type of data you’re working with as opposed to just relying on, you know, you have data that are very different, but then you cram them all into a bar chart, all into a pie chart, all into a chart that is just easy and it’s already there. And I don’t think that that makes justice to the data sets and the stories. 

Lee Moreau And in addition to the creative work you do, the design work, you’re also being asked to be on Royal Society of the Arts and things like that. The notion of new metrics. Are you trying to promote this notion of data humanism into those arenas to help those organizations rethink the way that traditionally they work? 

Giorgia Lupi Well, you know, if they engage with me, I think it’s maybe because they appreciate my approach, but I tend to not necessarily like evangelize or like share how people should do things. I think that when they have a specific problem that they’re asking you to help with, I usually tend to give my approach and like to work following my approach. But I also think their space for for everything. I mean, I don’t—I don’t I rarely work on to business analytic tools for internal monitoring of companies processes. I mean, I think that there’s a space for incentives like really working on big data, kind of standard visualization for some of those things. I don’t know. I feel that most of the times the context that I work on are communication, context or there’s a story to tell and it can be told through data. But again, it’s not necessarily that my work is for monitoring purposes only. So I really feel that those nuances in terms of the context are kind of important. And even the reason why I decided to join Pentagram, which is a brand identity company, is because what interests me is the possibility for data to be a language that we can all speak, to be a tool to tell stories rather than just, again, a tool that can make us more optimized and efficient, which we already know that it can be. 

Lee Moreau I’m glad you brought up Pentagram, or at least the design industry specifically and consulting, because I think in consulting we’ve seen probably over the last 10 or 15 years a lot of consulting firms also try to figure out data science and bring it in. And there’s been a lot of failures,. 

Giorgia Lupi Yeah. 

Lee Moreau A lot of attempts that have blown up and they haven’t worked. In some sense, you embody the fusion of those two things together. But when you look at the landscape and you look at the industry, basically the consulting world, where do you see this going in the future beyond your own work? 

Giorgia Lupi Yeah. Well, I mean, I think that even if we just think about design agencies, every client of Pentagram or of a design agency virtually right now uses data, whether it is to communicate to their client because their data company or whether it’s just, again, for internal purposes. And so I feel that even if we think about a rebranding as something that can help a brand tell a story that their audience can relate to. I mean, data is involved somehow. And I feel that for every designer right now to be data savvy, that and I don’t think that everybody should be a data visualization designer, but really understanding what it means to collect data, what it means for a company to base their decisions on these data, what it means for a client or a customer to have their data collected by the brand. I mean, I think it’s very fundamental. I mean, I just really think that then you’ll be able to apply whatever kind of design storytelling, campaign branding in, yeah, in a savvier way. 

Lee Moreau And the the work that you’ve showed, particularly the visual op-ed. This is a design research conference, right? And I think many people probably and I’m looking at that, I’m saying, well, that’s not academic research. It’s it’s not it’s very personal research. But what do you think an academic community or, you know, traditional design researchers can understand or take away from some of this work? 

Giorgia Lupi Yeah. Well, as I mentioned, I got contacted by quite a few researchers and doctors and practitioners, and I think my point with the piece was not to say this is how long COVID exactly look likes- looks like, but it is to really share what it feels like in general and how with only a few medical encounters that you have because you can’t be at the doctor every day and with a doctor only or a researcher’s even in long COVID, seeing a patient only in a few very limited momentum time. I think what’s going on in between in the days of the patient is probably missed because we have medical- electronic medical records that are this moment in time when we go get our labs and we have those numbers and we can see the trends in our labs, but those are usually after a few months apart at least, or a year apart. But what’s going on in between, especially with chronic illnesses, is really important. And I think that what can researchers take — I mean, if only some researchers in I’m not talking about design researchers, but medical researchers could really take this illness seriously and chronic illness seriously because they see what it really means on a daily basis as opposed to hearing from you when you go there that you’re more fatigued than usual. Well, that’s a win. In terms of design research, I mean, isn’t design research about finding new ways to communicate a particular problem. And I feel that maybe, you know, we haven’t seen a ton of visualizations there are so nuanced in the medical field. And so maybe this if we think about that project as a bit of a, you know, research project, probably it’s about how can we actually communicate that on thorough account of life. 

Lee Moreau Of life, of your life. 

Giorgia Lupi Yes. 

Lee Moreau Yeah. I’d like to take some questions from the audience. So I don’t know if anyone has been through to collect the cards that are out there, but if anybody has one, they want to walk it up. Just walk up to the stage and I’m going to take it. I’m going to read it. Thank you. All right. You’re the first one that was really efficient. Are you ready? 

Giorgia Lupi Yep. 

Lee Moreau Okay. What do you wish more people and perhaps especially designers understand about data gathering and production? 

Giorgia Lupi What do yoI think that most people could understand about data gathered in production? I mean, I feel something that I already shared, the data is so human made and it can be small and it could be really a beautiful narrative material that I think that everybody, even if they feel intimidated by data, they could start small. They can start by thinking, okay, I have a week of something to collect. What do you want to collect? You can even collect something that has to do with the weather or something outside. And then it’s very easy, you know, in a way I didn’t go into anything technical, but to translate quantities into lengths of a line, for example, or categories into a color of a symbol. And so even then I’m building a small legend for yourself and starting to experiment and how you can make a poster out of it, like something so small, I think starts to make people more confident with using data. And then if you’re very interested, of course there’s a whole profession and courses on how to become a data opposition designer. But I but I really feel that even before we think about data but thinking about ruled, ruled based design and how I can translate some numbers and qualities into symbols can be a really powerful tools for designer in general. We have so many. 

Lee Moreau Okay, I’m going to read this one. Dear Giorgia: I dealt with long COVID. I was sick in the very beginning of the pandemic. But I also suffered a traumatic accident. And. And it was your data project that inspired me to to look at the positive moments in my recovery. Here’s a— so there’s that. The question: How did you find the energy to collect and visualize such large amounts of data? 

Giorgia Lupi Well, first of all, whoever it is in the audeince, I am really, really sorry. And I empathize. I know that the journey of living with a chronic illness, at least for me, has been the loneliest things I’ve ever experienced. And so I know that there is this really big isolating factor, both because you’re too sick to do anything, but because the people around you as much as they can and want to try to understand, it’s really, really hard to relate. So I’m really sorry. And I’m and I’m glad that my piece could provide some, you know, maybe at least make you feel a little less lonely. Well, collecting the data, it’s something that I just logged on even when I was in bed, just like I had my spead sheet there that was already set up with all the categories. And so all that I had to do was filling in what was going on for the day. So it was a relatively low amount of energy that I needed to spend. And then how did I visualize it? I mean, I’m really lucky that I work with the team at Pentagram, and so I sketched out the whole piece. I sketched out the idea, I worked on the brushes and how I wanted them to be like. But then my team really helped me out and I feel that especially well, first of all, as I said before, in terms of design, I love collaborating and I always bring a team in to whatever I want to do, even if it’s highly personal, such as this piece. But then, I mean, they truly helped out, as in I had different projects going on and it was really also at a moment where I was I was feeling pretty sick. So I have to say it’s like really kudos and thanks to my team. But I whoever you are or whatever you are, I hope you’re doing better and I hope that recovery is really happening for you. 

Lee Moreau So we all watched your response and when you started, you were clearly emotional. Right? And then as you talked about your creative process, your tone changed and then you leveled out and were able to kind of deliver the point. Was that-was that a microcosm of this thing that you experienced because you just happened right here? 

Giorgia Lupi Well, I feel that well, for me, publishing the piece was kind of like coming full circle to a part of my illness. Now, will I ever fully recover? I don’t know. I might have this chronic illness forever. I might have remitting relapsing moments. But I think that designing the piece was also something that empowered me. And I felt I mean, I felt that, you know, especially because it was going to be published in The New York Times and so it was going to be very visible. I really hoped that it would make people feel less lonely and alone. And it gave me a purpose. It gave this whole illness, I mean, I don’t want to say that it changed people’s lives at all, but it gave these all four years a little bit of a meaning, if you will. And so, yeah, probably as soon as I started to truly design it, I also felt a little bit of relieves in the emotional burden that I’ve been carrying. 

Lee Moreau So we’re going to shift maybe something a little bit lighter. How do you visualize data? This is sorry, this is also how do you visualize data so it does not look like a boring graph question mark and like desperate, please help me. 

Giorgia Lupi Okay. So /laughs/ I think that so if you think about, okay, boring, boring graphs like parts, hearts, bar charts, it’s really mostly aggregated data. So we’re taking a lot of granular data point that could be so beautiful to visualize just by themself. And we aggregate them, put them together and cram that into those forms that we already know. And I think that when you do have disaggregated data, which means you do have the data points and they’re interesting to visualize, that is the way in which I think this  comes alive. And sometimes is good to aggregate because you want to know like, you know, what’s going on every quarter over time and you see it and you have it and it’s great. But I think that like having data that is not necessarily only aggregated but can speak to the granular individual data point is one way. And then again, if you can influence the data collection when you speak to your clients or when it’s personal data collection, honestly, the more that you add context. And so, you know, imagine, like Dear Data is simple again, the moments that you complain. While one postcard could have been just like one tally after another for, I don’t know, like 57 times I complained that week, probably even more like 100 or something. But that would have been not only a boring visualization, it would have been a boring story, but instead for every complaint, adding details about what was I complaining about. Was it a technology? The cold? The heat? Or who are complaining to? And was it really necessary? And what did it teach about myself? Not only crafted a more interesting visualization, because then every little layer of these categories that I’m talking about had a particular symbol, but it also told a much more interesting story. So I feel in general, the more that we can add context and then, you know, visual and content wise, the more these visualizations are less boring. 

Lee Moreau I hope that was helpful. Yeah. 

Giorgia Lupi Yeah. 

Lee Moreau So this. I like this question. What do you say to a slow data skeptic? 

Giorgia Lupi A slow data? 

Lee Moreau Slow data skeptic? Am I interpt- is that right? 

Giorgia Lupi Well, I mean.

Lee Moreau Did somebody write that? Yes. Slow data skeptic. 

Giorgia Lupi Well. 

Lee Moreau Yeah. So I can I can imagine as a consultant, I can totally imagine, like somebody calling. I’m a client. I’m calling bullshit on that, slow data. I don’t have time for that. Like, you’ve already got it figured out. Use A.I. or something to just crunch the numbers and make it happen. 

Giorgia Lupi That’s great. 

Lee Moreau What do you say to somebody? 

Giorgia Lupi That’s great. Do it. 

Lee Moreau Go for it. Okay. 

Giorgia Lupi Go for it. /laugh/ No, I mean, in general, though, I feel that again, I said it before, there is a spectrum like an infinite spectrum on how much you can allow yourself and your audience to go into details and to be low. Imagine the Long COVID piece, if I- if the Long COVID piece was okay, I’m aggregating all the time that I logged fatigue a thousand all the times that I logged Headache 1010, all the times that I logged nausea 800. I don’t know that this story would have been so interesting or also that people could relate. And so I feel that sometimes their space for slow and imperfect and very personal. There are some other times there isn’t. And I feel that in all kind of design, there’s a spectrum. Even if you think about designing the logo and thinking about a brand, I’m just like, because to to make it a little broader before you start a branding project like you started with position, do you want it to be fresh? Do you want it to be trustworthy? Do you want it to be, you know, feeling old school or feeling completely disruptive? And that’s a spectrum. And I think all the answers are okay depending on the goal of this company. And I think that is true as well for data visualization. 

Lee Moreau Yeah, it gives me a little bit of a nightmare thinking about the client who’s going to be coming to you, knowing who you are, but then also confronting you with this. So may not happen in a client scenario, but I can imagine many context in which that would. 

Giorgia Lupi But I feel that I mean, I’ve been also lucky in my profession because I feel that a client that is like, well, I wanted to do it with the AI and quick simply wouldn’t come to me. So it’s like self selected, you know. 

Lee Moreau Self-selecting. Yeah. So I like this question because I was curious about this myself. Thank you, Giorgia — these are like little love letters. 

Giorgia Lupi I want them all after this.

Lee Moreau Yeah —Your data collection and designs beginning and design beginnings for closely related to textiles, a craft that demands a significant time investment. How have textiles influenced your craft? And you know, we see your experimentation there too. 

Giorgia Lupi Yeah, well, I love, love, love. Anything that is textiles sort of. So at some point, one of the most fun projects I worked on was a fashion collection that I designed for the brand & Other Stories, which is part of the H&M group. And it was 15 pieces of garments that told the stories of these three women who were pioneers in a male dominated field, blah, blah, blah. I was really, really beautiful. And I find anything that is tactile even before then, textile that you can do with data, something of superficial feeling. And I feel that in general, as much as we are on our phone every day and we have like thousands of things that are happening digitally, I don’t know, maybe it is this is generational I and you all are so young and will not relate to this, but I feel that we remember more the themes and the pieces that we actually can touch. And I feel that there’s such a value still right now into having some artifacts that are purely like analog and metric physical in a way. So in general, honestly, like I am designing another textile piece, it’s a bit of a preview. It’s going to be a data driven jumpsuit for a friend of mine who has a company in New York. Then she makes beautiful jumpsuits and I always I mean, I would love to design at least one textile piece a year. I worked on a data rug before as well that actually the data points of this whole stripped rug again, I don’t know if it was shown, where about the history of endangered and lost textile techniques or even dug, was digging deep into the history itself. So I don’t know. I think that maybe partially because both of my grandmothers were seamstresses, I have that gene of wanting things to be. 

Lee Moreau I’m fascinated by it. This is a great question, I think, for this audience. When thinking about your own body as a source of data, what sort of practices do you have to protect yourself so similar to sort of protecting subjects? 

Giorgia Lupi Well, I used to wear a smartwatch all the time, and so I used to and like a WHOOP band like you have, and I have like also an Apple Watch to track different kind of things. I feel that I to be really honest, I haven’t thought about protecting myself from these data until the moment when I decided to only focus on the positive things. And this might be not what the question really is about, but for me, I really started to also notice that, you know, I would wake up and feeling not so crappy, but then I would look into my WHOOP band app and it said You slept crappy. Your heart rate variability is super low, your heart rate was very high, blah blah, blah. And I started to really like influence myself and say: Actually, no. I don’t feel so well. You know, you just. You do it, I think, or and so I feel that at some point, as much as it felt very strange to rip it off and take it off, but it was very liberating. And I think that that to me was the first form of protection that is not necessarily protection in terms of the data that I’m sharing with the company about protection from how the data can actually influence how you think. 

Lee Moreau Yeah. I mean, I think I presume the question was even even more from a technical perhaps from a more technical perspective, which is like the recording, the data and the preservation of the data. Obviously it’s it’s just you in your, I presume, in your bedroom keeping it, but it’s also how you handle that data is also something to potentially think about. 

Giorgia Lupi How I handled that — in terms of how I analyze it or how I store it or how I think about it? 

Lee Moreau Maybe all that. You talk about use the word material, right, when you’re referring to data. And I think whether the data, when it’s that sort of intimate and almost like I mentioned you touching the data, it becomes tangible. That’s kind of a different level. 

Giorgia Lupi But I think that if you think about it, I mean, as I mentioned, I don’t journal per se, but if anybody keeps a journal that the similar level I think of very intimate personal can be metric or physical if you do it on paper. And so it is about it. I mean, it’s an artifact is ultimately a story. It’s a memory that you create for yourself in the future. I think it really has the form of journaling for me. 

Lee Moreau Some people, this is another question, some people in recovery refer to it more as a discovery. Any thoughts on that? 

Giorgia Lupi Yeah. That’s really interesting. Indeed. I feel one of the things that I’ve been discovering in recovery, it might sound really banal, but then you hear from people that recover from illnesses. But how much my whole life I’ve just been taken for granted things that I shouldn’t. Such as the ability to walk, the ability to be free, to make a decision that doesn’t have consequences, the ability to do whatever I want, whenever I want, however I want. And still it’s free to be fine. And I think that I don’t think I’ll ever take it for granted anymore. And so definitely I think there’s a discovery of what makes life what it is, which I don’t think necessarily is what we have, what we own, but it is the freedom of really just being without having limitations. And that’s that’s a new discovery. What else? I feel— 

Lee Moreau Were you hearing, I mean, so many people reached out to you. 

Giorgia Lupi Yeah. 

Lee Moreau How how did they respond? What are some of the different things that they maybe saw in you that they were kind of mapping against them? So I think like a mirror. 

Giorgia Lupi Truly the overarching average message is really beautiful all the time. It is. Thank you. Because finally, I have one thing to really send to all my family as my friends, to make them understand what I’m going through, or also some others that told me. A lot of my friends have sent me your piece and and said, I’m sorry that I didn’t reach out. I had no idea that this is what you were going through. So I really just think that sometimes by seeing, seeing it and seeing how it looks like and in this case, in form of data, primarily because I didn’t publish any of my photos of me in bed in the piece, like intentionally not because I was scared of privacy or anything, but because I thought that people probably could identify a little more if they didn’t see a face and only saw this story panning out through data. 

Lee Moreau So the photos that you showed here, were not in the actual piece. 

Giorgia Lupi No. They weren’t in the piece no I showed them for context. I put them in the pitch, too, because, you know, in the pitch I started with, this is me and all the accolades and the stuff, but this is also me with the photo of me just pretty much being not able to function. 

Lee Moreau I’m curious about the reception to that pitch because after —there they are, there you are — the reception, the pitch like had they- what did they tell you about that? Was this something unique that had anybody else in doing this? Are there there could be thousands of people potentially tracking their symptoms like this, but you did. 

Giorgia Lupi Yeah, Well, I still maybe have also been lucky. And in the in the unlucky-ness of not only have been tracking my data, but I happen to have a team that can help me visualize them this way. And you know, this is what I do for a living. So it’s not really only about tracking, but is also being able to find a visual way to tell the story. So as I as I mentioned, I pitched to The Washington Post, The Guardian and The New York Times and they all said yes. And I think it’s because Long COVID has been a topic that has been out there, but with pretty much two type of literature. One, there are these like form of blog post, which is similar to my story, but only told through words and others that are just like new research on long COVID shows, X, Y, and Z. But probably from a patient perspective, again, a daily account of that has never been seen. And I decided to go with the Times, honestly. I mean, I’m in New York and so The Guardian also was in the UK and it was a little less easy for me to just necessarily relate to the audience that I had, but primarily because of technical limitations. So with The New York Times, I could do whatever I wanted, with The Guardian in The Washington Post. They were actually is sort of like form of that I had to follow. I couldn’t necessarily have the text interact with the brushes that I had in mind. And so but-but all the three editors that I spoke with just really said this deserves to be published. And I you know, I’m just very honored. 

Lee Moreau I’m glad it was. Yeah, I’m going to use your maybe switch back to your architectural brain a little bit, which is going back in time. There’s a question about can data help design spaces or buildings that can actually help healing people, not in terms of numbers, but through the collection of experiences? 

Giorgia Lupi Interesting. I think so. Even if I think about the data that I collected or that some long COVID patients might be collecting, I mean, for example, there’s a lot of us that at times have experienced visual disturbances and extreme sensitivity to lights. And if you really see that a certain type of the population, for example, even if it’s not their primary symptoms or manifestation, but have that feature, well then you can start design spaces differently. I feel that especially when you design spaces that are for healing, whether it’s like a particular branch of an hospital or anything, honestly, really having a deep knowledge of what the patients are going through as opposed to relying on standards of how usually you do an OR together, like, you know, close to whatever flow. This is great already programing, but I feel that maybe if we had more patient collect data that can be given to architects who specialize in health care spaces. Definitely. I mean, again, I’m not a practicing architect and so I really never practice architecture. But I but I think in general would be super valuable. 

Lee Moreau Yeah I, I wonder if that’s happening, nearly enough. 

Giorgia Lupi We can inquire. 

Lee Moreau I think that’s the whole field that you could start to enter. 

Giorgia Lupi Yeah. 

Lee Moreau This might be a timely question given that we’re getting to the end of our time here. There’s a temporal element of the date of, there’s a temporal element to your data collection. Do you have an end point in mind when you start? How do you find it? And yeah, I think you could extrapolate that to your entire life too.

Giorgia Lupi Yeah, I feel that. I mean, again, it depends on what you’re collecting with the  Dear Data project for example, we knew that it was going to be 52 weeks. We knew that we wanted to do it for a year, and the format itself was one different type of data point every week. So we kind of designed the whole thing and we even designed the 52 weeks in terms of topics to be able to paint a portrait of the other person. So mapping our activities, our thoughts, our surroundings, the interaction with our partner. So that was very pre-planned. But I think many collections. So for example, when I started to collect data on my long COVID journey, I mean, I actually hope I wish I didn’t have to collect them for four years. I wish that the data collection could just have finished much earlier. 

Lee Moreau Much, much earlier,. 

Giorgia Lupi Because that would have meant for me not to suffer. So I think some some of these are open ended, right now that I’m tracking this progress. I feel that if I keep feeling that this progress is going, at some point, maybe I will not need to collect any more. I don’t know. I feel that most of the times when you’re doing personal data collection to discover something about yourself, I don’t think that there’s necessarily an end in point. The data collection will evolve, will-and will change, but it’s hard to preplan it to say, I want to really discover this about myself, but I’m only going to do it for two months. But in other times when you are doing it, say for for a project and again Dear Data or the Moleskin, I had to deliver at a certain point. And so that that there’s a temporal element by default. 

Lee Moreau I can only imagine it’s terrifying when you do a document that tracks every day of your life from the beginning to now. If you take that, I mean that that was a great question, whoever asked that question. Final question I want to ask you is towards the end of your talk, you said that data has the power to move people if we use them correctly, if we tell personal stories with them, and perhaps even if we render them in the right way visually. Can you share your hopes for what data can do for us as we look to the future of design? 

Giorgia Lupi Yeah. Yes. I mean, I think that probably what you’ve seen about data tonight and today is that data can make us more human in a way because it can help us access bits of our lives that if we don’t pay attention in that kind of very one subject at a time way, we might miss. And I think that is what I hope that all kind of data, even the one that will be processed by AI or generated by devices, will ultimately allow us to put in the nuances that makes us us. 

Lee Moreau Giorgia, thank you so much for all of your time. 

Giorgia Lupi Thank you. Thank you for the questions. 

Lee Moreau Thank you. 

Giorgia Lupi /applause/ Thank you. 

Lee Moreau Design As is a podcast from Design Observer. For transcript and show notes, you can visit our website at Design Observer dot com slash Design. As you can always find Design As on any podcast of your choice. And if you like this episode, please let us know. Write us to review, share with a friend and keep up with us on social media at Design Observer. We’d love to give you a seat at our roundtable however we can. Special thanks to Maxine Philavong at the Northeastern Recording Studio and Design Observer’s editor in chief, Ellen McGirt. This episode was mixed by Judybelle Camangyan. Design As is produced by Adina Karp.