Darca-LookingOutwards01-Giorgia Lupi
The video I choose is from an information architect Giorgia Lupi in Eyeo 2014. She talked about her obsession with hand drawing and its role in her life as a design tool and a means of expression. She draws constantly whenever she is thinking, and it helps her so much to understand herself as an artist.
She takes her drawings very seriously and not seriously at all at the same time. She draws whatever is in her mind and does not really try to make sense of them, enjoying the moment of spontaneousness and comfort of expression. Then a lot of times in her work, when she tries to visualize complicated data and information, she can somehow retrieve the once random shapes and images in her drawings and create amazing and out-of-box ideas.
She talked about it like it happened so naturally, which is the most fascinating for me, that for her, working as an artist has become an extension of her inner self therefore is truly enjoyable and adventurous. Just like when she talked about her work visualizing the data of scientific articles and their citations over the years, she is inspired by her love of the music notes. She was fascinated by how music notes can display such compact information with so much elegance and simplicity, and how much they resembles the relationships among many factors in the scientific world, and translated the symbols of music into variables that can accurately reflect the information hidden in the data of 20 years. It appears to be a delightful coincidence, but in fact it takes really deep understanding of the data and imagination to make the connection valid, and create a whole new perspective. It is not only a good example of problem solving in design practice, but also human-centered design thinking, which results in an experience for the readers to engage, explore or even care, therefore delivers the information that is initially obscure and hard to follow through.
The Life Cycles of Ideas, Popular Science
Aside from her amazing projects, the speech really got me thinking about what makes an artist unique, what makes an artist’s personal style, and what I can do to find my own. While it’s difficult that information is overloaded, and everyone has his or her own theory of how to make it to the other side, her insistent self exploration and unprejudiced acceptance of herself and her art is truly inspiring. But most of all, she makes me never afraid of my ugly drawings again.