Pentagram

Giorgia Lupi Wins National Design Award

Preview — Sep 07, 2022

The information designer is honored with the prestigious award in Communication Design.

Pentagram is thrilled to announce that our partner Giorgia Lupi has been selected to receive the 2022 National Design Award for Communication Design. Presented by Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, the National Design Awards honor innovation and impact in design.

A prominent voice in the field of data design, Giorgia Lupi is an information designer whose work synthesizes data and storytelling in innovative ways that make data more accessible and easier to understand. The selection of a data visualization practitioner in the communication design category recognizes the growing role data plays in our lives. In her work, Giorgia is an advocate for “data humanism”—using data to uncover the human stories behind the numbers and statistics, and to challenge the idea of data as something that is impersonal and intimidating.

Giorgia creates engaging data-driven visual narratives across print, digital and environmental media. She has built experiences around data for corporations and brands such as Google, Verizon, IBM, Deloitte, and Starbucks. Her cultural and institutional clients have included the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Triennale Milano Design Museum, the Getty Museum, and the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

She has created custom data visualizations for publications like The New York Times, Wired, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and Italy’s Corriere della Sera. She has also used data to help bring awareness to some of the world’s pressing challenges in projects for non-profit clients and causes including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Knight Foundation, the World Health Organization, and the United Nations.

She has designed a data-driven fashion collection for & Other Stories and was invited to create an artist’s book for the Moleskine Foundation. She has been commissioned for original art installations by MoMA, the Museum of the City of New York, the New York Botanical Garden, and TED. In 2021, she was the inaugural data artist to be selected for the RAND Art + Data residency.

Giorgia was born in Italy and received her Master’s degree in architecture from Università di Ferrara and her PhD from Politecnico di Milano, where she focused on information mapping. In 2011, she co-founded Accurat, an acclaimed data-driven research, design and innovation firm with offices in Milan and New York. She joined Pentagram as a partner in 2019.

Her work is held in the permanent collections of MoMA. A former MIT Media Lab Director’s Fellow, she is a member of the World Economic Forum's Global Future Council on New Metrics and a Fellow of the RSA. She received an honorary doctorate from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2022.

Her TED Talk on her humanistic approach to data has over one million views. She has published two books, Dear Data (Princeton Architectural Press, 2016), exploring the details of daily life through hand-drawn visual data; and Observe, Collect, Draw! A Visual Journal (Princeton Architectural Press, 2018), a guided journal for collecting visual data. Lupi has been featured in international media including The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Washington Post, NPR, BBC, T Magazine, Vogue, and Vanity Fair.

Congratulations, Giorgia!

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