Federica Fragapane on Visualizing Theatre, Children’s Books and More
An interview with the information designer, playwright, actress and illustrator
Federica Fragapane is a detail-oriented and multifaceted information designer based out of Italy who focuses on transforming cultural, environmental and social data into museum-worthy data visualizations. She has designed pieces for the United Nations, Scientific American, Corriere della Sera — La Lettura and many institutions across the globe. Fragapane also illustrated the infographic-driven children’s book, “Planet Earth: Infographics for Discovering Our World.”
MH: How did you first get into data visualization?
FF: I’ve started approaching data visualization at university during my studies at Politecnico di Milano, where I attended the Density Design course. During the course I understood how interested I was in this field: I was particularly interested in using my design competencies to talk about different topics and issues, communicating them and helping their comprehension. This is the reason why I’ve also worked on my Master Degree Thesis with Density. Paolo Ciuccarelli was my supervisor and I worked on a visual analysis of organized crime in northern Italy, exploring the topic through the tools of text mining and data visualization.
After my studies I started working at Accurat Studio. I worked there for 3 years; it was a great and inspiring experience. Then I’ve started working as a freelancer, my current situation.
MH: What made you make the jump to freelance?
FF: I was receiving freelancing offers not only from Italian agencies but also from other parts of the world and that can be rare in Italy. So that was the main reason: I was very curious to see how my career would have evolved as a freelancer.
MH: You’ve written about this, but can you elaborate on what happened to your eye and how that affected your work?
FF: At the beginning of 2012, a few days before I started working at Accurat, I had a cornea infection in my left eye. I wasn’t able to see out of my left eye at all, I could just see a white smudge. And so, at the time the doctors weren’t able to tell me if I would be able to see out of my left eye after medications or not. I spent months under medical care. The healing process was particularly important for my design approach.
MH: You talk a lot about ‘hooks’ in your work. Can you expand upon that? How did your work evolve and change after the sickness?
FF: It all connects to that experience, right? Yeah, so the visual hooks are what I try to design now. I was connected to them at the time. During the healing process, I used to do these daily tests with my parents to check the state of my sight in my left eye. I’d sit in front of a magazine — always the same one because it worked by always being the same magazine and same page. I covered my right eye (the healthy one), and looked to see if there were any improvements. And (over time), luckily, there were. So, I recovered most of my sight in that eye.
Day by day, I tried to look for these visual hooks and day by day they would slowly emerge from the pages. I really tried to catch my sight improving by catching such hooks. To me, it was really important to see if I was able to see more details than the day before. This changed my approach to design because when I started to see these details day by day and emerge, it really made me aware of the relationship that people can have with visual elements, details and these visual hooks. So this experience changed me. Now, of course, as the first step, I design the structure of the visualization after having analyzed the data. But then, I always tried to design these hooks in order to try to catch the viewers’ sight and start a connection with them, as I was using such details to start a connection with the pages (while recovering from the corneal infection).
MH: Are hooks something that grabs your attention or just some extra details that simply add to the piece?
FF: I’d say a combination. First of all, something that grabs my attention during my looking-for-inspiration process. So, I look for visual inspiration and when I find the texture, color or shape that captures my attention, I try to replicate it to start a connection with the readers. So it’s mostly something that yes, captures your attention but also is in the details. I think that visual details can have an important role in catching people’s glance (grabbing people’s attention). I think that the care that went from really focusing on the details can be understood more or less consciously by people looking at the pieces I work on and I think such care can have a role in their engagement.
MH: During the healing process for your eye and after, did you ever consider a more physical approach to data visualization?
FF: It’s something that I do in some of my workshops, actually. But honestly, I don’t know if it’s connected to that part of my experience. It’s something I like to do to push the boundaries of visualizing data. When I propose workshops there are some of them where I make the participants work with clay. They only have a dataset and white clay to build data sculptures with: I don’t want them to use color to visualize information during the exercise. That’s the first step and then I work with them with digital or hand-drawn visualizations. So yes, maybe it’s connected but not consciously.
MH: In addition to creating data visualizations, you’ve also written and acted in plays. Do you find yourself getting the same feelings/emotions when on stage vs when making and presenting a visualization?
FF: I think that the emotions that a performance can give are more intense — I mean, if it’s a very good performance. But I think it’s the combination of the two where it becomes interesting. In my experiments I was trying to combine theatre performances and dataviz to try to use what I knew about dataviz and combine it with something I really love doing. The project was a visual representation of what was currently happening on stage — the interactions among the characters, their movements and the number of words pronounced by each other to each other. I liked the idea of using shapes as an enhancement of what was currently happening on stage.
MH: What do you think data visualizations can teach people that theatre, a very different but also visual platform, cannot?
FF: I think that data visualization can give theatre the visual upsides and abstractions. I think it’s interesting getting the contents of the performance, taking the interactions and combinations of words and movements and abstracting them gives the viewer another version of them. Just abstract and visual. I think this can be interesting. Like, I’m showing you the core of the interactions in this story. And from the other side, I wanted to visualize real-time movements and real-time interactions. This is why every piece resulting from each performance is unique. I think the uniqueness and the warmth given by the theatre and the fact that there are people talking to each other and moving can bring something to the visualization as well.
MH: What is your workflow when you’re creating your data visualizations?
FF: I like to combine the data analysis phase with the visual inspiration phase. The first step is really understanding who’s the client and what they’re looking for. Most of my visualizations are visually more complex than the classic infographics audiences are used to because the specific context of the medium I work with allows me to design such visualizations. For example, my visualizations for La Lettura, a weekly cultural supplement published during the weekend, can be approached by readers with a slower reading process, slower than the one that characterizes a newspaper, for instance.
So, understanding the client's needs, the reader’s and, of course, analyzing the data. But I like to analyze the data and at the same time to focus and look for visual inspiration because I understand that combining these two phases, data analysis and visual inspiration, allows me then to work on visual models that are of course connected to the data but are also something different and inspired by the shapes I’ve filled my eyes with. Then I sketch things. I sketch on paper and I do sketches to put my thoughts on paper. I work on my static visualizations in Illustrator and combine that with other free tools.
MH: What are the other tools you use in your work?
FF: RAWGRAPHS, first of all. I use it to build a skeleton of my visualizations. Many of my visualizations are custom made, so I use a RAWGRAPHS skeleton and then design over them. I use Gephi for networks and QGIS for maps or cartographic projects. So these three tools are the ones I use the most.
MH: You seem to have a very specific style with your level of detail, use of color and shape. How did you develop that style in your visualizations?
FF: I think over time, I’ve tried to understand which shapes and colors I’m attracted to and catch my attention. Then I try to replicate the shapes, colors, and patterns. I think that doing this, on a daily basis, helped me in defining a style.
Something I also try to do is look for inspiration from worlds that are not dataviz-related. I think it’s important to know the other data visualization projects that have been published and it’s important to keep yourself informed. But I always love to take inspiration from shapes and images coming from other worlds: photographs, shapes from nature or paintings or sculptures. I think this has helped me a lot and helps me in trying to design something that is connected to something that I personally like and helps me find my style.
MH: What was your experience having to tailor your visualizations to an audience of children, rather than adults, for the children’s book you made?
FF: It was very fun, but also difficult because I’d never designed visualizations for children. So, first of all, I’m the co-author of the book and the other co-author of the book is Chiara Piroddi, a psychologist. She’s an expert in Developmental Neuropsychology and she had already written books for children. Working with her was extremely important because I had never designed a book for children and I had to make sure the book was comprehensive enough for them.
Something that I enjoyed doing was having to remember what I loved as children and what kind of books I loved. I really remember reading a lot as a child and there were specific pages in specific books that would really bring me a lot of joy. I think it’s important if we’re working with children’s books that we try to make a visual connection with the children who are going to read it. And so this is why I tried to remember which elements brought me joy when I was a kid. I spent an afternoon surrounded by my old children’s books because my parents had most of them, and I was flipping through pages saying, “I love these colors, this page still gives me joy.” So remembering was a very important process and I really enjoyed it.
You can find more of Federica Fragapane’s work on her Behance page or by following her on Twitter.
