From the Archive: Georgia Lupi

Giorgia Lupi is a partner in the design firm Pentagram and an artist whose data-driven work is at MoMA in New York.

Accurat helps companies visualize data. For IBM, Lupi and her team created chart models, visual styles, and animation guidelines to inform their corporate design language.

In art projects like Dear Data, a collaboration with Stefanie Posavec, Lupi says she likes to challenge the idea that big data “will tell everything that we need to know about the truth about our lives.”

Lupi calls herself a data humanist, and looks for the human stories in data.

Her latest art project, a 20-foot mural at the Museum of Modern Art, looks at more than 100 past and future fashion trends.

Data can be messy, Lupi says. You can work to make it clearer, but you can’t always eliminate complexity:

When clients come to us and say, “Oh, you need to make something really easy that my boss will read and understand even without looking at the legend,” I’m wondering what type of people run this company.

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