Clad in all black and with a short crop of bright red hair, the Italian information designer Giorgia Lupi was beaming from behind sturdy thick-rim glasses when we met up this April at the annual TED conference in Vancouver
 In a few weeks she would be announced as a new partner at the renowned design consultancy Pentagram, where she would continue her work as an information designer, an area of graphic arts concerned primarily with data and the real stories data contain beyond numbers and algorithms
 It was at the 2017 conference that she created unique “data portraits” for attendees based on visual representations of their answers to a series of evocative questions, such as “when do you get your best ideas?” At this year’s conference Lupi had a secret to share
 As we leaned over her iPhone, dashes, dots, and various geometries came into focus, and then: fashion sketches
 Over the last year Lupi has been translating her data-driven method of making art into a clothing collaboration with the Swedish retailer & Other Stories
 The line hits stores this week. The designs tell the stories of three remarkable women: Ada Lovelace, Rachel Carson, and Mae Jemison, who made groundbreaking contributions to mathematics, environmentalism, and space exploration, respectively
 “Working with fashion, you need to think differently than when you design a pattern for a page,” she said of the cotton, wool, mesh, and neoprene clothing, which is embroidered and printed with her data visualizations
 “The material, the medium, and the way that I collaborated with the designers is fantastic
 I’m really so in love with these three stories.” The dresses, jackets, and other pieces range in price from $49-$349 USD and can be found at select & Other Stories locations and online
 Lupi’s projects often use information to promote empathy and provide context. For her project “Bruises: The Data We Don’t See,” Lupi visualized the experience of having a child living with an autoimmune disease
 She gathered the child’s medical records and the amount of hope and fear her mother felt on any given day
 The final expression looks like a blooming hydrangea but takes on a different meaning up close
 She’s currently working on a data visualization with the New Yorker about asylum seekers who were killed after being deported
 Top: Lupi demonstrates her data-driven methodology while a model wears a dress based on Ada Lovelace’s algorithm
 Bottom: The design is a visual rendering of how computer algorithms have advanced over time
 Courtesy of & Other Stories.Most Popular “He’s F--king Destroyed This Town”: How Zuck Became the Most Reviled Man in TechBy Nick Bilton “There’s a Real Concern for This Guy’s Safety”: News Outlets Grapple With Unmasking the Whistle-BlowerBy Joe Pompeo Of Course Trump’s Idiot Son Outed the Alleged Whistle-BlowerBy Bess LevinAdvertisement Her work with & Other Stories takes on the weight of history
 She isolated specific aspects of each of the women’s experiences, assigned visual elements to those details, and then created infographics based on those assignations
 “I imagine not everybody will really understand what’s behind [the clothes],” Lupi said
 “But I feel that even just knowing that there’s information, that people will wear these stories and have them at home, it’s really heartwarming to me
” In Lupi’s vision, Lovelace’s algorithm, which provided the framework upon which our computers run, is rendered as a staircase of muted tones, swatches, and dots
 For Carson, she took the most-used nouns from Silent Spring— “chemical,” “insect,” “year,” “bird,” and more—and denoted their frequencies with lines of various lengths and colors
 The 126 orbits made by Jemison, who became the first black woman to travel in space in 1992, appear as black spheres with multicolor shadows
 They are meant to represent what the sky looked like on the various days of her mission
 And all of this, Lupi explained as we reached the end of our tiny iPhone slideshow, was in the process of being turned into textiles, which would then be transformed into jumpsuits, blouses, jackets, and more
 Though it’s a departure from the work Lupi is known for, the fashion collaboration is imbued with the same type of breathtaking detail and layers of granular data points that comprise all of her projects
 Only this time you can wear it. Top: Lupi’s legend for decoding her data visualization of Silent Spring
 Bottom left: The Carson infographic mapped onto jumpsuits. Bottom right: Lupi’s rendering of Mae Jemison’s 126 orbits
 Courtesy of & Other Stories. It makes sense that Lupi would try her hand at fashion
 Long before she joined Pentagram; before she cofounded her own company, Accurat; before her Ph
D.; and before her master’s in architecture, Lupi was a child in her grandmother’s tailor shop, in Italy, sorting buttons
 That was  where Prima, her grandmother, did her work and where Lupi enjoyed toying with all of the “buttons, threads, and ribbons, organizing them by sizes and colors,” she recalled
 “I drew tiny labels for her so she could understand how to interpret it. I think I was already a data collector even though I didn’t know it
” Before Prima died she got to see the evolution of her granddaughter’s obsession and the artistry that emerged around it: maps based on city dwellers’ experiences; hand-drawn postcards seemingly covered in doodles but that, when decoded, actually chronicled the common data of Lupi’s life, like emotions, errands, and time spent checking the clock
 “I’ve always been more interested in unveiling the hidden patterns that are already a part of our lives as opposed to getting granular about aggregated numbers,” she said
 (Those postcards became a book, Dear Data, which Lupi coauthored with her pen pal and fellow information designer, Stefanie Posavec, in 2016
) “One project after another,” she said, “I am refining what I’m doing and understanding why I’m doing it more and more
”Most Popular “He’s F--king Destroyed This Town”: How Zuck Became the Most Reviled Man in TechBy Nick Bilton “There’s a Real Concern for This Guy’s Safety”: News Outlets Grapple With Unmasking the Whistle-BlowerBy Joe Pompeo Of Course Trump’s Idiot Son Outed the Alleged Whistle-BlowerBy Bess LevinAdvertisement Lupi holds up her favorite piece from the collection, a mesh dress embroidered with the Carson infographic
 Photograph by Mary Alice Miller. Lupi’s analog approach to data is a reaction to a misuse of the medium
 She believes we need to “approach data for what it represents: the details our lives
” Instead of treating data as though it is omnipotent, Lupi refers to her work as “data humanism,” a term inspired by the Renaissance humanists who put human nature at the center of their worldview rather than God
 “We created data because we could not store life on a hard drive,” she said. “Data humanism is my way to reclaim a more human approach, even if that means adding imperfect human qualities
” Quantity is nothing without quality, and Lupi wants people to know that. Enabling people to have a physical experience with data, by wearing it, is a way of getting data humanism into mainstream culture
 Last month, in New York, Lupi shared the prototypes. She had already picked her favorite based on how it felt in her hands—a gauzy blue number with an embroidered infographic pertaining to Carson’s Silent Spring
 “It’s just so precious,” she whispered. Her mother had had a similar reaction to seeing Lupi’s work in a new, physical form
 “I was like, ‘Mom, you can touch it,’” she had reassured her. “‘You can even try it on
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