Eyeo 2015 – Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec

For the purposes of this blog post, I’ll be talking about both Giorgia and Stefanie.

Giorgia and Stefanie are both ‘data visualizers’ by trade, but in contrast to many others in similar roles, they are not hybrid creatives/artists who have a computer science angle. They are both traditionally trained in the design & architecture disciplines and do not program or develop digital artifacts directly. Both of them are also public figures who have spoken at many conferences and festivals.

Both Giorgia and Stefanie have produced impressive results in their efforts to focus on the human quality and material reality of quantitive information and data, especially in traditionally technical contexts. Stefanie worked at Facebook as an artist in residence communicating the behaviour in through people’s relationship statuses. Similarly, Giorgia has spoken about the human meaning of data, and how the numbers are only a proxy for people and their actions: “[we both] work with data in a handcrafted way, trying to add a human touch to the world of computing and algorithms.”

Something I found especially resonant about their work was how they clearly positioned themselves as differentiated and unlike others in the business of dataviz. I believe it’s a particularly good example of embracing one’s areas of passion instead of following the trends of the mainstream alone.

Speaking to their presentation style, they both present real ‘in the moment’ documentation of what happened instead of process-fictions or overbuilt case studies. This is something I’d like to begin to incorporate more into my own work.