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Data with Heart: Giorgia Lupi’s Journey from Visualization to Human Connection
1.3k Plays5 months ago
Georgia Lupi joins the show to discuss her work in data visualization, her journey from Accurat to Pentagram, and how she takes a human-centric perspective to working with and communicating data. Our conversation also focuses on her new book, “This is Me and Only Me.” The book encourages kids to observe and collect data to understand emotions and human questions, using symbols and colors to express emotions. Giorgia hopes the book will inspire kids and adults to be imaginative, observant, and mindful. We also have some breaking news on this episode because Giorgia is working on another big project, a new book called “Speak Data” that explores data as a language intersecting various fields.
Keywords: data with heart giorgia lupi’s journey from visualization, heart giorgia lupi’s journey from visualization, giorgia lupi’s journey from visualization to human connection, lupi’s journey from visualization to human, heart giorgia lupi’s journey, data with heart giorgia lupi’s journey, giorgia lupi’s journey from visualization, giorgia lupi, dataviz, data visualization, human connection jon schwabish, jon schwabish, visualization, lupi’s journey, heart giorgia, mathematics, Al, machine learning
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Transcript
Introduction to Georgia Lupe's work
00:00:12
Speaker
Welcome back to the Policyviz Podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabisch. I have a very special guest this week on the show, my good friend, Georgia Lupe. You certainly know her name from the Dear Data Project, from her work at Pentagram, and possibly from her latest book, A Data Visualization and a Data Book for Kids. This is me and only me. Georgia's the first guest of this podcast 10 years ago.
00:00:40
Speaker
We've been friends for a long time and so I'm so excited to have her back on the show to highlight her new book. I invited Georgia to talk about her work on that book, how she thinks about communicating and working with kids in and around data, and of course lots of other things that she's working on. We talk about her recent piece in the New York Times, we talk about her thoughts around data humanism, particularly as it relates to kids, and we talk about
00:01:06
Speaker
All the things that she's worked on, the fashion work that she's done, the data rugs that she's done, tiles she's done, illustrations she's done. Georgia is a force of nature, a force for good in the data visualization community. I'm so grateful she was able to take time out of her schedule to join me for this exciting conversation.
00:01:26
Speaker
So make sure you check out all of Georgia's work on her site, on the Pentagram site, lots of places to learn more about what Georgia does and the types of work that she creates. And of course, check out her new book, This is Me and Only Me on Amazon or Goodreads or wherever you get your books. So I'm not going to waste any more time. This is a great conversation. Super fun to talk with Georgia again. So here we go. Here's my conversation with Georgia Lupe.
Georgia's journey in data visualization
00:01:55
Speaker
on the policy biz podcast. Holy moly, the one and only Georgia Loopy. I wish I had a good rhyme for that. Hi, Georgia. So good to see you. Hi, John. It's really good to see you. You know, I was thinking this morning prior to the pandemic, I was coming up to New York fairly often. I felt like I was seeing you like
00:02:19
Speaker
every few months we would like grab lunch and then the pandemic hit and now uh and now i've gotten to see you we've talked like three times in the last couple months for various things it's it's great to see you um loving the stuff that you are working on and you've got a new book coming out for kids which is super exciting yes
00:02:38
Speaker
Um, do we want to do like a Georgia loopy retrospective? Cause we were just talking right before you were like first guest on the podcast. So that was like a decade ago. So we've got a lot to cover. This is pretty exciting. And I, you know, you've done 20 million episodes and you're very prolific. It's like, yeah, I feel like I've talked to, you know, not quite everybody I want to talk to. There's still some names out there. I want to, I want to get a hold on, but yeah, um, honor to be back.
00:03:08
Speaker
Well, I'm so great that you can take some time. So where do you want to start? Do you want to talk about maybe moving from Accurate over to Pentagram to start? Because I think when you were last on the podcast, you were at Accurate, you were running Accurate, and now you're at Pentagram. And I think people would be curious to hear maybe what you're working on there and maybe how you've
00:03:34
Speaker
I don't know, maybe how you've just changed or evolved in your thinking around data and data visualization over the last 10 years. Cause I'm sure, I mean, I know you've done all the data humanism stuff and, and, and you've done, everybody's listening to this show knows it's all of your great work, but, but maybe the, the thread here.
00:03:52
Speaker
would be to hear about how you've changed your thinking about communicating data over the last decade or so. Of course. Well, and also maybe let's not assume that everybody knows who I am and what I do. Okay. All right. Okay. Like the humility is just.
00:04:07
Speaker
All right, go ahead. I am Georgia, and at this point, John, we're close friends. I think we can say we go way back. And I'm Italian originally, but I moved to New York in 2012. So at this point, I call New York home. And I've been working with data in various capacities from a design perspective.
00:04:27
Speaker
since a couple of years after I graduated architecture. So I'm not a trained statistician, data scientist, or even at this point, there are information design courses at universities and data visualization courses. I came from a completely different background. And so my approach to data, especially at the beginning, when with my partners at Acura, the company that I co-founded back in Italy in 2011, nobody was a data specialist, like the person that I used to work
00:04:54
Speaker
with the closest was Simone, a sociologist, and so we started to work with data really asking ourselves questions that are fundamentally about human nature and society and relationship and behaviors because he was the one driving the content.
00:05:10
Speaker
And we've been working on a bunch of editorial projects when we really had the chance to, again, choose the stories and go and find and combine data. And also on the other end, because again, nobody was also using any D3 libraries or Tableau or softwares that would give us shortcuts to produce data visualization. We also like really created what I call visual models from scratch. And so you'll see those data visualizations back then in 2011 that
00:05:38
Speaker
were very articulate, unusual, you had to kind of like read the legend to understand it. And so that's kind of like the beginning of my love story with data. And more and more in the years to come at Accurate, of course, we started to have bigger clients, we hired software developers, and we worked more digitally and less manually in a way positioning elements from Excel to Illustrator, but really actually,
Storytelling with data
00:06:04
Speaker
you know,
00:06:04
Speaker
working at a scale in a way, which is something I've loved. But I still think that the approach that shaped my relationship with data is still the one that I started with, even with big data and corporate clients and all of that.
00:06:21
Speaker
Now, I'll make it short and then we can go in depth into whatever you feel is helpful. In 2019, I actually had the shift of a career after almost 10 years at Accurate and I joined Pantagram. And Pantagram is a
00:06:37
Speaker
big independent graphic design firm. We have offices in New York and London, Berlin and Austin. And Pentagram is absolutely not known for data visualization. The bread and butter is brand identity. And so really creating logos and shaping how brands, which are any kind of company in a way, present themselves into the world, reposition themselves where there's a moment when they have to reach a new audience or change the way they operate.
00:07:04
Speaker
also pantagrams well known for exhibition design, campaign design, titles for movies and shows and so really kind of like the more traditional way of communicating and I joined a bit as an outlier but like happily so because I really believe that right now and that is really what moved me
00:07:23
Speaker
data can become a language that everybody could speak and it can become a powerful language for brands to express in themselves because we think about it virtually every client a pentagram work with data and has to communicate data but a lot of the time data visualization is just an aftermath of a branding exercise and it's not taken as seriously as the core values of
00:07:45
Speaker
the company and the brand. So I'm very excited to be working in this space together with honing in on the storytelling aspect that I've always been interested in. And so we've been working on campaigns and projects that are true, you know, communication design. And on the other hand, I've also worked on some fun projects such as a fashion collection that have data patterns on it, a data rug,
00:08:09
Speaker
some tiles that have been manufactured really nicely that have data patterns. So yeah, I mean, I've been speaking a lot already. I'll pause here. That's the past 15 years in a nutshell. 15 years of Georgia Lubbe's career in 30 seconds. Yeah.
00:08:27
Speaker
So there's a lot we could talk about. So I guess the one, so there were two parts of that description that, that I found really interesting. One is on the storytelling piece. And the other one is on data as a language. And I'm curious how you and the folks you work with think about data storytelling, right? So one of the arguments that I've made over the last few years is.
00:08:53
Speaker
we kind of throw around this word stories with data a lot. And really at the end, it's like, it's a line chart. Like I'm not sure that's a story the way we would like really think about a story, but a lot of the work that Pentagram does is bigger and broader and working, you know, with larger projects. And so when you work with folks there who are traditionally have been telling stories, sort of traditional stories, but now you're weaving in the data, how do you have those conversations? What are those projects look like?
00:09:22
Speaker
Sure. And as for our clarification, I, so Pedram is made of different partners and every partner has their own set of clients, skill sets and
Personal experiences with data visualization
00:09:32
Speaker
teams. So we pretty much function as independent studios. So yeah, long story short, I most of the time operate by myself and with my team within the Pedram platform.
00:09:41
Speaker
But I've collaborated with other partners for a specific project that benefited from arguing, say, somebody who's been doing traditional big branding for universities, for example, and myself. There's collaboration, but also I'm very independent, which is the beauty of Pentagram in a way. And I would like to really talk about what does it even mean to tell stories with data? I think it can mean many, many different things.
00:10:06
Speaker
as long as the data points themselves are not just crude and cold numbers because I think I agree.
00:10:14
Speaker
A line chart tells a story, but I think from a design perspective, an authorial perspective in a way, if you can add, and this is my whole spiel about data humanism that I do all the time, context, personal details, maybe if you have the opportunity to connect a bigger trend that can look like a line chart with some points in that trend that can talk about the individual data points, the human being that is behind that,
00:10:40
Speaker
the particular location of that climate change impact in a way or something that is really a little bit more relatable. To me, that is when we start to talk about telling stories with data and how my practice has evolved. I think over time, I've paradoxically became less focused on data itself, but really just focusing on, okay, I'm primarily a designer. My
00:11:06
Speaker
favorite tool or material is data. There's a power in data, but primarily it is really about communicating a message, sharing a feeling of, say, for campaigns in a way where you want people to relate, to say, wow, to want to participate to the cause. And I feel that sometimes data can just be the anchoring point to then expand into stories that don't necessarily have to be data driven. And
00:11:30
Speaker
This is really just my evolution. And I don't think that there's a right or wrong way to do it. But I feel that personally, I thought I've been doing a lot of data visualizations my old career. And I feel like I like now to expand. I mean, if you look at the wall behind me, your listeners will not see it. But it's like full of pure data visualizations. And that's still my passion. But I like to think about data in a bit of a broader way now. Yeah.
00:11:57
Speaker
And so how do you and your team think about getting those stories? This is this is something that comes up a lot when I talk to, you know, quantitative data analysts or scientists or researchers who want to do all the things that you just mentioned, right? They want to enrich their visualizations or their charts with these stories or experiences. And so how do you practically go about doing that?
00:12:24
Speaker
I mean, I feel that I do have most of the time the luxury of being together with the people that shape the story themselves and shaping them together in terms of the collaboration with my client. So it's pretty rare that a client comes to me with a data set and wants to visualize the data set period, because in those
00:12:45
Speaker
Occasions, I feel, you know, you can try to push to add external data sets and extra context and you can try to push to make it less of a dashboard, but more of a, just for this, I'm simplifying for the sake of making myself more of a scrawly telling piece. If it's digital before you get to the interactive Tableau map, whatever it is, you have some context and intros and explanations and personal anecdotes or whatever it is.
00:13:11
Speaker
Sometimes you just cannot do it and I feel that it's also okay sometimes to just have a chart, the chart, it's what it is.
00:13:18
Speaker
You know, I can make a couple of examples of projects where to me, we've been doing true storytelling with data. One recent one is an article that I, with my team, published on the New York Times. It's a visual op-ed that is about something personal, which is my journey with my health, which hasn't been really kind to me in the past four years. I've been suffering and now I want to say I am recovering from long COVID, which is, you know,
00:13:46
Speaker
maybe at this point people know what long COVID is but are the health consequences that might take many forms and shape and degrees of severity following a COVID infection. Most people right now
00:13:59
Speaker
get COVID, don't even think about it, and they get back to their lives and they're fine. But for some of us, that hasn't been the story. And so I've been battling with physical limitations, continuous flowing of symptoms of different kinds, 24-7, pretty much for the past four years, and really done interviews myself with healthcare, doctor's appointments, cans, lab tests, therapies, injection, infusion, different medication treatments.
00:14:25
Speaker
And of course, I've collected a lot of data about it because this is what I do. And at some point, looking at the long COVID stories that were out there, I decided to try and publish something because the stories that I saw, and I think this is important in terms of what data can do. The story that I saw published were, you know, very moving, but at the same time, you would just read a blog post or an article and you'd read a list of 10 symptoms, 15 symptoms. And I think that
00:14:53
Speaker
For a healthy person, these might have felt like, well, okay, I'm tired as well after work. Sure, I have addicts too. Okay, yeah, sometimes I'm nauseous. But that is so far away from the experience of living 24-7 with a chronic illness. Like the term fatigue doesn't even start to describe the crushing impossibility to move your body that happens. So long story short, with all the data that I collected day by day that we're a mix of
00:15:20
Speaker
real observation of quantitative lab tests, the biometrics from my smartwatch that were all off, but also the nuanced qualitative symptoms that I was experiencing every day, my limitation and all of that. I thought that telling a story that could be a complete account day by day of my four years could really shine a light onto what it means to live with this condition. So I think the power of storytelling with data sometimes can
00:15:48
Speaker
really just actually shine a light on the granular versus the aggregate. You can link it in the show notes. Yeah, I absolutely will. I want to ask you about that piece since you brought it up. I mean, I can imagine a lot of people and a lot of people do collect their own personal data about lots of different things. And a lot of people would
00:16:09
Speaker
presented as a bar chart or a line chart, right? I'm thinking about, you know, the sort of folks that I work with, right? Other economists and social scientists, right? They make a bar chart. But the way you presented that information was these little, I guess, paintbrush strokes sort of thing.
00:16:25
Speaker
And I'm curious what you would say to someone who looks at that and says, oh, I've collected my health information or my exercise information. But my instinct is just to create a bar chart. But what would you say to someone who says, yeah, I'd make a bar chart, but I want to be more creative. I want to engage people the way you were able to engage millions of people with that piece. I'm guessing.
00:16:48
Speaker
you wouldn't recommend everybody go out and get a degree in design. But what would you say to someone who wants to make something engaging but doesn't know how to...
00:16:58
Speaker
get started. Totally. I mean, I think that honestly, not everything needs to be necessarily engaging to a point that you've never seen something like that before. I think personally, the reason why I decided to go for this painted brush language is I've been thinking about what do I want this piece to do? And I've had the opportunity to do it in the New York Times. And so, of course, the visibility has been pretty wide in a way.
00:17:25
Speaker
And my main goal in a way was actually to make people feel something, which it's in a lot of my projects. And I feel that because my story was so personal, but I hoped that it could, first of all, make the people that could see that are suffering from long COVID or any other chronic illness feel seen and understood and not so alone because the experience of a chronic illness is the most lonely thing.
00:17:52
Speaker
to me that you can think about in general, health scares or health problems as much as you have family around you and all of that. It's the loneliest place because your body fails. You are so uncertain in terms of what's going to happen in the future.
Designing data communication for emotion
00:18:05
Speaker
You are not yourself anymore. So, you know, this aspect and I wanted people to just, you know, feel seen and recognized and validated. And on the other end, I wanted for people that didn't know what long cold it was to
00:18:18
Speaker
for a second, try to immerse themselves in the world of constant daily litany of elements to your body. So to me, like the language of this repetitive paint brushes that actually start with the piece in a way that it's not even a data visualization, you start to see colored paint brushes that are interacting with the text and highlighting
00:18:40
Speaker
the symptoms that I'm describing in different colors so you start to understand that a paintbrush is probably a symptom and a different color is a different kind of symptom and then you know slowly you build this calendar of like never ending scrolling of days in a way and I feel that I decided for that language because of my goals in a way and so that long explanation that I gave is to say I don't think that necessarily everybody needs to paint it in an artistic way
00:19:09
Speaker
It needs to somehow just fulfill the purpose and I feel that some other times having a graphically rigid geometric bar chart can also be the solution because if you want to communicate a certain level of trust, rigor, institutional knowledge,
00:19:31
Speaker
I don't think that a paintbrush is probably the best way to do it because it does communicate evolution nuance, uncertainty, imperfection. So I guess if I have to really abstract it, I'd really suggest really truly ask yourself what is that you want to communicate? What is that you want people to feel and to understand?
00:19:51
Speaker
And then trying to experiment and see if going a bit out of the usual ways of depicting data can be helpful. I think that maybe people depict me as somebody who hates bar charts and pie charts. I don't. I'm nothing against it.
Creating a children's book about data
00:20:12
Speaker
Yeah, you have the early work and accurate I always whenever I think of your early work and accurate is always like stuff that's like in a 45 degree angle. I still remember at a visualized conference.
00:20:26
Speaker
You were speaking after me and you were making your examples and at some point you were talking about the problem that you had with the client or whatever or like a challenge and then you feel the screen of the next slide with tilted small multiples of WWOG-LD. What will Georgia Loopy do? And I'm still laughing about that and the whole audience was laughing.
00:20:50
Speaker
45 degrees and you'll get it. Yeah, it's 45 degrees. Just a lot of them, 45 degrees. Yeah, that was a fun talk. Yes.
00:21:02
Speaker
So there, there are two things I want to talk about, but I think maybe we switch gears to talk about your latest project because it's interesting hearing you talk about stories. And now having a kid's book coming out, you know, you know, the next couple of weeks, um, because when I think about stories, that's my first thought is like, okay, so how would my kids or any kids think about, you know, what is a story? Right.
00:21:28
Speaker
And so, and of course, just for folks who don't know your project with Stephanie Posovic, the Dear Data Project, there is for folks who don't know, there is like a little mailing list of people who are working in doing Dear Data and they're mostly educators.
00:21:46
Speaker
And I always find it fun to find an email show up. It's like, hey, I'm a teacher in Austin, Texas, and I'm doing dear data with my class. And I would say, yeah, 90% of the emails that show up are educators. So I guess my question is, where did the idea for the kids book come? What was the inspiration for it? And for folks who don't know, what is the book about?
00:22:12
Speaker
Yeah, so the book will be out in a couple weeks and it's called This is Me and Only Me and it's a collaboration with my co-author Maddie Gardner, who also has been working with me a pentagram. And she was a preschool teacher before becoming a project manager. So it's been really lovely to work with her as somebody that really knows and understand kids. So the book is a book
00:22:34
Speaker
a picture book for children. And if I have to take a step back, I would say that definitely, you know, the origin of all of these was dear data, which is an experiment that Stephanie and I have done with extensive personal data collection for 52 weeks mailing.
00:22:50
Speaker
data postcard back and forth every week from London to New York and New York to London. We're really in 42 weeks, we've explored pretty much everything about ourselves. And so noticing our behavior, our thoughts, our environment, what makes us happy, what makes us sad.
00:23:07
Speaker
pretty much painting a portrait of the other person through this only layer of data. Then people got excited, as you mentioned, educators wanted to experiment with kids in terms of like making them observe reality through this data lens, which again, it's not only how many time a certain things, but like qualities and human questions related to it, such as what was I feeling? What was the context?
00:23:30
Speaker
And on the other hand, also using it as a tool for creativity, being a little less afraid of the white page and working with quantities and numbers and symbols. So the second iteration of their data also was a journal called Observe Collect Draw that Stephanie and I published in, if I remember correctly, 2017 or 2018, a couple of years after their data.
00:23:54
Speaker
Really because we got so many requests of like teaching workshops and how can we do it? And so we did this journal that made this kind of observation actionable. There is exercises and graded pages for you to fill in with symbols of your own, um, making some times or suggested by us. And that got pretty popular too. And I think that really honestly, from that time on, so it's been like a bit of an idea that was in the back of my mind for the past five or however many years.
00:24:21
Speaker
I always thought, you know, this will be such a nice story for a picture book. And my idea has always been pretty simple, starting with an inanimate object of any kind, whether it's a circle or rock, anything. I didn't even think about the visual language then. And then the more these entities observe things around them and about them, the more this becomes this colorful portrait that makes this human being seminal.
00:24:49
Speaker
So that was just really the origin. And then, you know, long story short, I talked about it with Maddie, who has much more knowledge about children than I do. I don't have children and I also have not, you know, grown up with children around me. I'm an only child. My parents were both only children. So there's no nephews, nieces, anybody, you know.
00:25:09
Speaker
And so we collaborated really in really figuring out what can be some aspects of collecting data that can really resonate with kids. So pretty much the ball starts with a hollowed circle that has a black outline and starts by saying, this is me and only me.
00:25:26
Speaker
and you flip the pages and you start to see that it starts to add these colored symbols on the days when I'm happy, different symbols on the days when I'm sad and going on and on and starting to add more details, interacting with people, observing also the feelings in them that might be a little confused if you don't stop and actually acknowledge a name then
00:25:48
Speaker
And really, in the end, building a beautiful portrait of what makes you you. So it's pretty simple idea in the end. I hope you can and something that might inspire not only young kids, but, you know, I've always wanted to make this book that adult feel like, oh, this is interesting, too. Right. But what's interesting about the way you describe that book is I do you view it as a data book or as a data of his book for kids?
00:26:14
Speaker
I don't, to the point that we don't mention the word data until the very end. The last page is a bit of an explanation that said all that you've seen so far can be called data. But I think that this is an invitation to observe and it is an invitation to actually also start to like yourself for who you are and the things that make you new.
00:26:37
Speaker
Um, and I mean, yeah, I know I really don't see it necessarily as a data book. And I have been very opposed when some publishers suggested that in the end we add some activities because to me, it needs to be inspiring.
Testing and impact of the children's book
00:26:51
Speaker
I've already done a journal and a like kind of like classroom kind of a book. And I pushed back, um, in, yeah, in making it become a database book. I really want the story.
00:27:04
Speaker
Yeah, that's what it sounds like. I'm very excited to get my hands on it. So did you and I'm excited to hear that that Maddie is a was a preschool teacher because I think that brings in like that to your point from earlier, like that's the experience that you need to understand who you're communicating with and communicating, you know for but yes,
00:27:25
Speaker
Have you tested it? Like, did you bring it into classrooms or give it to kids? I'm sure with other things that you've written, you know, you send it out to people to like peer review and that sort of thing. But like for kids, did you like how did you do that?
00:27:38
Speaker
We did. We did do some sort of like informal, very anecdotal testing around that and our publisher also. So the publisher is Coraini, is an Italian publisher that I really love working with. They are the original publisher of all Bruno Munari's book. And they've been publishing these beautiful books that are artistic, poetic, and design oriented. And the editor that has been working with us is very,
00:28:08
Speaker
you know, she works in children's book. She's been very helpful too. And, you know, we've tested it with the kids around us that could, you know, give us some feedback. And I think what I've liked to observe is how, so the book is not illustratively figurative in a way that all the representations are abstract. We don't see animals or flowers or things like that. Everything is abstract. And
00:28:33
Speaker
But maybe the concern that I had in the beginning is, you know, will kids relate? But turns out that at least in our little experience so far, and again, the book's not out publicly yet. So we'll see what parents and children think. But really is that with this abstract way, like every time that you go back, you can see different things. And there's like little as you go through the book that make you explain what you know, that actually have you understand what is that symbol? What is this other?
00:29:02
Speaker
And I think that in the end, that abstract representation could be just really a way to foster imagination even more. And hopefully something that kids want to get back to. It's almost like the difference between a written book and a movie. And sometimes you want a movie because you'd like to just see what the author thought in terms of what does that character have to look like. But some of the times I also want to imagine.
00:29:26
Speaker
Right. The way you describe it also feels to me very consistent with your general approach to data, and particularly with the data humanism. I mean, it sounds like what you're trying to accomplish with this book
00:29:43
Speaker
is to get kids to not to get kids but to encourage kids to feel comfortable with themselves comfortable with other people and sort of kind of in some ways kind of like see people behind the data for you know i'll use that term loosely in this context is that like do you feel like that's where you need to start with like with kids
Finding meaning in observation and adversity
00:30:04
Speaker
Well, again, I think I don't have kids, so I'm not necessarily the best person to talk about that. But you know, I was a kid myself, and I was a bit of a nerd kid, just collecting stuff. And you know, but I also know that if there's something that kids really have that maybe we all lost is the power of imagining. And so I think that
00:30:27
Speaker
the imagination of what every kid can see in those symbols and how they can actually translate it to things in their lives. And I feel that the inspiration of saying, you know, oh, I've never really paid attention on what's happening on the bus on my way to school. And, you know, this is really an invitation to observe in very different areas of your life, even the one that seems the most mundane. And I feel that the record relation with DR data
00:30:53
Speaker
and something that I can't stop thinking since Stephanie and I almost 10 actually 10 years ago at this point started the project is that we always and this is has nothing to do with design or data is really have to do with life we tend to remember and look forward to the big grandiose event and instead like the beauty of the daily details of the most mundane things just like get lost and when you learn to
00:31:20
Speaker
attention. I mean, now, I don't want to sound like a meditation mindfulness, you know, preaching or anything like that. I think that learning to open your eyes and as opposed to going about your life with a spotlight onto what you're thinking, but really just shining a lantern on what's going around you. It's such a
00:31:39
Speaker
way to sometimes go about your life and I think it's something that has helped me and has been helping me even with this illness to try and think about it's very easy to point my focus for example and this is an extreme situation but I feel that everybody might feel like that for other aspects of their life it's very focused to just
00:31:59
Speaker
It's very easy to focus on what's wrong on my body, what I can't do, what are my symptoms right now, what is the fear that I have about whether I'm going to pay for these later or whatever this is going on. But instead, if I stop and every time I remind myself, I'm here in this room, there's all these beautiful things around me.
00:32:17
Speaker
today's the day where I've been able actually to accomplish x, y, and z as opposed to thinking about what I don't have. I mean, does it cure my illness? No, but it makes everything a little bit more bearable. And again, this is an extreme example, but you have to really learn to pay attention, which is something that they should teach in school, I think.
Educational potential of Georgia's work
00:32:36
Speaker
Yes, patience and gratitude. Yeah, I think that would be really helpful.
00:32:41
Speaker
If you were the, I don't know what they call it in, in New York, but if you were the superintendent of the New York city schools, would you, and you can model it on the Georgia loopy corpus of works out there. Do you think that your projects kind of work together in sort of a data?
00:33:01
Speaker
data curriculum like I would say I don't have the book yet so I'm like waiting. So yeah there it is yeah so like but I can imagine the way you've described that book it feels like it's for the for the youngest for the younger kids right the I don't know if what you have my like three to six three to seven something like that more like
00:33:21
Speaker
five to 10, perhaps five to 10. I think like four to eight, perhaps. Yeah, right. So then those like eight, nine, 10 year olds are in the age group where they can start doing like the early deer data stuff, right? So that's like observe, collect, draw, and then you get a little bit older and you have like the teenage kids who could do like the deer data stuff the way you and Stephanie did it where they're collecting their own data. Like if you could build that curriculum,
00:33:50
Speaker
Do you think we'd have a population of young adults who are more data literate? Do you think they would just be more creative? Do you think they'd just be more able to observe the world around them? Where would that like high school graduate be? That was their curriculum. That's a really interesting way of thinking about it. And I feel, let's say that my ambitious has never been to completely heal the first grade.
00:34:16
Speaker
I was giving you more things to do, that's all. No, no, but it's interesting because it's true. I think, you know, this is me and only me. It's just an introduction to being inspired by who you are and what's around you. And also, of course, starting to make you think that not all the stories needs to be completely figurative or maybe I'm missing a word in English, like really representative of reality. And that there's an element of visual going out there and thinking about something different that can happen.
00:34:46
Speaker
then you're right, observe, collect, draw can start to be exercises that can teach you both to observe, but also to start and translate numbers of things that you've collected into symbol and then they start to be lengths and colors for categories and sizes and positioning on the page. And so I, you know me, John, I've never been like a didactic academic.
00:35:09
Speaker
And I think that that is a little bit of my way of teaching, just making you think about how you could do those things. And then you learn by yourself. And I feel that your data, maybe it's that more poetic, oh, I can be very creative with data. And if these people send each other postcards, maybe at this point, I can write a love letter with data or build a sweater, a sweater that has data.
Future of data as a language
00:35:35
Speaker
And so I think that that is a little bit more like, OK, and now you can expand.
00:35:39
Speaker
Now, I don't even know if I mentioned it, but I am co-authoring another book that maybe is part of the next step. This is going to be out in 2025, so I don't speak a ton about it. And it's like, I love working with co-authors, if you haven't seen the trend. And I'm working with my dear collaborator, a Pentagon strategist, Phillip Cox, who's been working with me at Pentagon for, you know,
00:36:05
Speaker
the longest time since I joined. He's been with me and is fantastic. And we are working on a book that is called Provisional Title, Speak Data, which is for the first time a bit of a textbook and it's filled with interviews with people that are not necessarily data expert, but artists, meteorologists, healthcare,
00:36:26
Speaker
practitioners and people in all different fields that tangentially have touched upon data. So it is a way to actually start to think about data as a language that can touch every aspect in a way of the world that we live in. And it's a little bit more of, let's say, we've been thinking about it like a guy did that if you don't know anything about data, but want to have a dinner conversation that is informed. Yeah.
00:36:52
Speaker
um so yeah there's there's that too so i think i'm covering the whole you've got you've got like the world according to georgia like all the way through kata 22 um it's not often there's breaking news on the on this podcast but um i'm glad to have like breaking news yeah um well that's that's really exciting i mean i i think you know all together i can see this sort of thread that pulls i mean obviously pulls through your work but just unlike
00:37:18
Speaker
helping kids as they age, as they grow, to think about their own data and their own identities and then the world around them in this sort of broader way. And to hear you speak about your own health issues over the last few years, like with this patience and gratitude for what can be as opposed to what is sort of bad and negative. Yeah, I think it's really exciting.
00:37:46
Speaker
It is. I mean, you know, John, I feel like we've never or like maybe nobody ever thinks that they are prolific enough or that they are accomplished enough or productive enough. But I think maybe if I pause, at least I know that I have been putting out
00:38:04
Speaker
pretty much all the ideas and thoughts that I had. Now, are they helpful for the world? I don't know, but at least I know that I'm trying to sort of like keep experimenting. And one thing that I feel that, I mean, maybe you look at my work and it looks all the same, but I've kept from the beginning really
00:38:22
Speaker
wanting to experiment with new challenges, new mediums, new type of data, new outputs, new type of clients. I don't think that I'll be fulfilled if I kept doing the editorial data visualization for the main Italian newspaper, like I've done, you know, like I feel really to me.
00:38:39
Speaker
expanding and even going out of my comfort zone. I mean, now my partner at the branding agency, I'm working on branding project. It's fun. It doesn't really always have data in it. When I can, we do use data, but I'm even learning how to just get completely out of the comfort zone of having numbers to visualize, but really write messages and how do they translate into a symbol that has no data points behind it. So yeah,
00:39:05
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, I think that's, that's part of the, what in my experience of having done this now, right. So, uh, episode one, you were on and now episode, I don't even know what number this is 260 something like, you know, there's been an evolution in the field and the evolution of the way people have approached data, not just from an individual perspective, but the way we get data now, the way we, the tools we use the platform for use. Um, so I think it's, it's really interesting to see.
00:39:33
Speaker
people evolve and change in their approach to data and their approach to visualization. And now, in another year, we'll have the entire Georgia Loopy literature to take us all the way through from birth to young adulthood. And then I'll retire. Then you'll need to write a book like Data Vis for retirees or something like that. You need to help people get ready for retirement.
00:39:59
Speaker
Georgia, thanks so much for coming on the show. It is always great to see you. Congrats on the new book and the forthcoming book. I can't wait to see them. I will put links to all the stuff that we've talked about, all the dear data stuff and the data humanism stuff and pentagram stuff so people can reach out and find you. So again, thanks so much for coming on the show. Always great to see you. Thank you, Joey. It was so fun. Such a pleasure, as always.
00:40:24
Speaker
Thanks for everyone for tuning into this week's episode of the show. I hope you enjoyed that conversation. I hope you'll check out all of Georgia's work. I've got links in the show notes to the many things that we talked about, ranging from your data book all the way to her new book, This Is Me And Only Me, and a range of other projects and products that she has worked on over the years.
00:40:44
Speaker
Before you go, as you're tuning out, as you're getting ready to move on to your next podcast, if you could just take a second to rate or review this show on your favorite podcast provider. You can also check out the video version of the show over on my YouTube channel. And as always, check out lots of great content when it comes to your data visualization work over on my website, policyvis.com. So until next time, this has been the Policy Vis Podcast. Thanks so much for listening.