Giorgia Lupi is an Italian information designer and former co-founder of data-driven research and design firm Accurat Lupi calls herself an information designer because she gives people access to information and shaping the way that people access information. She is a co-author of Dear Data, a collection of hand drawn data visualizations, along with award-winning information designer Stefanie Posavec. Her work is also part of the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art. In 2019, she became a partner on Pentagram's New York team.
Early life and education
Lupi was born 1981 in Italy. When she was a little girl she would spend a significant amount of time collecting and organizing all kinds of items into folders: colored sheets of papers, tiny stones, pieces of textiles from her grandmothers buttons, sales receipts and so much more grew in her collection. She has said she took pleasure in organizing and categorizing her treasures based on their, sizes, color and dimensions. She has said that her childhood interest in numbers, cataloguing and classifying rules and systems explains the origin of her work and her desires to play with data. These interests have also included the scales of large cities and urban mapping projects, and representing information layers underlining an architecture project. She graduated from FAF in Ferrara, Italy, where she studied architecture. Lupi has her masters in architecture, but has not build any houses during her schooling career. An architect’s job is not to build buildings, but they design representations of buildings, images of building’s following a system of symbols that convey information about how to manufacture them. After graduating in 2006 She worked with two different interaction design firms in Italy, mostly working on interactive installations and mapping projects showing off difficult systems of knowledge. In 2011 she began her PHD in design at Milan Politecnico and started Accurat. In 2012 she moved to New York City where she lives now.
Career
In 2011, Lupi co-founded research and design firm Accurat, that combines design and data to create data visualizations, interfaces, and tools. Among their clients are Google, IBM, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Starbucks, United Nations, and the Museum of Modern Art.. Lupi’s influences for her work come from fascinations by geometrical feel and balance of abstract art compositions. Lupi's work has been influenced by data visualization and data art by Moritz Stefaner, Aaron Koblin and Jer Thorp. What drives Lupi in her career is the overlapping space between intuition and analysis, between beauty and logic, numbers and images. In 2014 Lupi began the Dear Data Project with Stefanie Posavec. Every week for one year Lupi and Posavec exchanged a "data drawing", a hand drawn data visualization that represented a part of their daily life, through the mail. In 2016 these postcards were compiled and published in a book called Dear Data. The following year the Museum of Modern Art added the original Dear Data postcards to the Museum's collection. In 2016, Giorgia Lupi published an article in Print Mag in which she introduced the concept of Data Humanism, which she further developed in her TED Talk. According to Lupi, data is just an instrument that people created to record and archive reality and is always a placeholder for something else. Lupi warns against simply focusing on numbers, technologies, and algorithms when working with data and suggests to instead focus on what data represents: people, stories, ideas. She argues people should reclaim a personal approach to how data is captured, analyzed, and displayed proving that subjectivity and context play a big role in understanding even big events and social changes. In 2019, Lupi joined Pentagram New York as a partner.
