The Art of Insight

Chapter 7Data and Persons

with Federica Fragapane

Figure 7.1: “The Stories Behind a Line” by Federica Fragapane, in collaboration with Alex Piacentini

http://www.storiesbehindaline.com/

We are ready to question the impersonality of a merely technical approach to data and to begin designing ways to connect numbers to what they really stand for: knowledge, behaviors, people.

—Giorgia Lupi

The week I was transcribing the following conversation with Italian designer Federica Fragapane I was also reading Helen Macdonald's luminous essay collection Vesper Flights (2020). In the introduction, Macdonald talks about the accelerating extinction of animals and plants:

I think of the wood warbler, a small citrus‐colored bird fast disappearing from British forests. It is one thing to show the statistical facts about this species' decline. It is another thing to communicate to people [that their experience of a forest] that is made of light and leaves and song becomes something less complex, less magical, just less, once the warblers are gone.

Federica's best work isn't about birds, but about people. However, the interplay between the statistical, the qualitative, and the personal is often present in her delicate designs. Her “The Stories Behind a Line” is a good example (Figure 7.1):

Years ago, my boyfriend met an asylum seeker who had arrived in Italy from Somalia. He spoke about ...