Giorgia Lupi of Accurat & Ben Jones of Tableau Software

Wow. This month's speakers come from even further away than last month! Ben Jones lives near the Tableau mother-ship in Seattle, and Giorgia Lupi hails from Milan. (OK, technically she now has a home and an office in NY as well, but we're no less grateful that she's visiting us!) Come join them and the rest of our membership for a great evening that covers both the art and the technology of producing beautiful, effective, informative visualizations.

About the Talks & Speakers

Giorgia Lupi will speak first about her innovative and award-winning design agency, Accurat, and their creative practice model. Then she'll show 4-5 successful examples of their work, including a collaboration that won a Cannes Lion, projects for Corriere della Sera, and a project we'll be privileged to see before its public release. She'll talk about Accurat's commitment to building "aesthetically beautiful experiences with data" without sacrificing complexity, and how that commitment shapes their process and their visual choices.

Giorgia Lupi is an architect, teacher and researcher. She calls herself "an architect who builds information and not houses." She is Founder and Design Director at Accurat (http://www.accurat.it/), an information design agency based in Milan and New York. She is a Visiting Fellow at the Parsons Institute for Information Mapping (PIIM) (http://piim.newschool.edu/) at the New School, and has been an instructor at NABA (http://www.italian-design-academy.com/).

Giorgia graduated Ferrara University in Architecture in 2006 and is a PhD candidate in design at Politecnico di Milano's Density Design Lab (http://www.densitydesign.org/). Her research seeks to explore the way that information is currently transforming networks, culture, societies and urban space, and to build systems that provide meaningful visual narratives in support of decision-making processes. She comes to us fresh from her presentation at the EYEO Festival (http://eyeofestival.com/speaker/giorgia-lupi/).

Ben Jones will show us how anybody can start with a basic dataset and leverage a great tool like Tableau, combined with best practices for analysis and visualization, to rapidly extract insight and knowledge from the noise of raw data. He'll use a couple different data models to demonstrate how these principles and practices can be applied across different contexts.

Ben Jones lives in Seattle and is Tableau Software's Marketing Manager for Tableau Public (http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/), and an avowed "data visualization enthusiast." A graduate in both engineering and business (from UCLA & California Lutheran), he combines all of those interests in his excellent blog, DataRemixed (http://dataremixed.com/).com and his twitter feed @DataRemixed (https://twitter.com/DataRemixed).

Tableau Public is a product of Tableau Software (http://www.tableausoftware.com/): "We make fast analytics and data visualization products. Founded by an Academy-Award winning professor from Stanford University, a savvy business leader with a passion for data, and a brilliant computer scientist, we’re trying to solve one of the most challenging problems in software – making data understandable to ordinary people. We’ve become one of the fastest growing software companies in the world.

Why are we launching Tableau Public? We want to help people put data online in ways that are fast, useful and beautiful. We want to improve public information, on the public web, for the public good. We’re starting this mission by launching this free service for bloggers, journalists, citizens, teachers, students, hobbyists and enthusiasts. Our hope is that this will blossom into commercial use by companies and governments."

About the Event

As usual, we'll start refreshments at 6:30pm with time to network, catch up and meet new people with interests in data visualization. The formal presentations will begin around 7:00pm and there will be time for Q&A afterwards. So please join us for these excellent presentations, the best DataViz networking in New York, and some light refreshments.

Please note: only those with confirmed RSVP's will be able to attend, because of security requirements at the space that generously hosts & sponsors us. Reservations will close at 5:00pm the day of the event. If you aren't able to get a slot by then, we apologize, but you won't be able to enter the building. For this reason, we've expanded the number of RSVP's we accept, to account for no-shows and to make sure we fill as many of our seats as possible. But, please cancel as early as possible to make room for other attendees. Thanks for understanding, and see you there!

-Paul & Christian