Opened on March 1st, 2019, the XXII Triennale di Milano, Broken Nature: Design Takes on Human Survival, highlights the concept of restorative design and studies the state of the threads that connect humans to their natural environments––some frayed, others altogether severed.

The Broken Nature exhibition at the Triennale Milan begins with “The Room of Change” and visitors find themselves at the apex of the show’s theme, with an installation that speaks to the heart and the brain; provoking emotion and reflection.

The room hosts 2 big screens projecting images of our earth changing from above from the NASA Archive and covering the past 20 years.

Satellite images by NASA show the impact of human intervention on the environment—between melting glaciers and structures so invasive they change the landscape forever.

Cerebral though it is, the exhibition hits hard.

On the walls surrounding these two screens is a large tapestry work of data design by Accurat ( a data design studio with offices in Milan and New York )

For ‘The Room of Change’ Accurat created a 30-meters-long hand-crafted data-tapestry illustrating how multiple aspects of our environment have changed in the past centuries, how they are still changing, and how they will likely continue changing, addressing many of the topics presented in the exhibition.

With this installation, Accurat questions a communication made only of data and numbers and suggests a change of scale and perspective.

Combining several different data sources depicting the world from both global and local-individual perspectives, the installation tells stories of people and their relationship with what has been around them over time, layering dense and granular information within the narration to highlight how change is pervasive at all scales.

Gabriele Rossi, Giorgia Lupi and their team at Accurat, have visualized global phenomena (such as the increase in world population and temperatures, diseases, energy consumption ) alongside more local topics (such as the disappearance of Lake Aral or the decline in life expectancy in Cambodia) and created a sort of graphic tapestry.

A legend accompanies the piece to explain the global framework and how to read the individual stories.

The legend is placed at the center of the room, inviting visitors to discover our changing world from a privileged perspective: a pedestal to navigate the big changes in the same way you would look at mountain range with the help of a navigating map.

“ This is a show for citizens; we want them to leave with a sense of the long term, and the sense that complexity is our friend, not our enemy.

We also want citizens to leave these galleries having a sense of what they can do in their everyday lives,” ……………..  Paola Antonelli

The data represented begin in 1000 B.C. and run into a speculative future ending in 2400, echoing some of the exhibition’s overall aims.

The tapestry complements the “bigger scale” of the projections with a type of story about change that could be relatable, smaller and connected to our everyday lives and our mundane experience.

With this premise, our guiding principle was the idea that most of the change we experience is only shown to us from far away and high above.

At first glance, a visitor might not even realize that data is the organizing principle of the motif.

However, the data-driven wallpaper creates a morphing visual pattern that unveils the importance of a perpetual interplay of scales and dimensions when assessing change, and illustrates the evolution of many recurring themes of the show: a subtle and poetic tapestry depicting change, from our past to our present to our future.

The piece revolves around eight macro topics that organize information, all related to humans, but that reveal consequences that oftentimes affect us and other species simultaneously.

Each horizontal stripe depicts the evolution over time of one single story of change, told thru a combination of datasets on the topic evolving over time.

From left to right, time flows on the wall through the visual patterns, covering our past, our present, and our future; and where each of the visual components defining the pattern is a theme, and each vertical section of the wall becomes a snapshot of a precise moment frozen in time

They are illustrated through a number of global data sets (world population, average temperatures, disease rates, energy consumption, et cetera) to frame large-scale phenomena with broad strokes as well as single and specific stories that will directly or indirectly represent the micro consequences of the large-scale phenomena (such as the disappearing Aral Sea, the dip in life expectancy in Cambodia during its civil war, the quick shift in South Korean exports from agricultural products and commodities to high tech, and more).

The research and design have been conducted with a deliberately humanistic approach: data represents real life, it is a snapshot of the world just as a picture captures a small moment in time.

Numbers are always placeholders for something else, a way to capture a point of view—but sometimes this can get lost.

In fact, even if we are depicting “data”, this data needs always to speak to us – human beings – it is always based on subjective collection and interpretation and will always have different meanings for different people.

As designers, the more we are able to combine – “colder” and more sterile type of data, with layers of contextual, smaller and more relatable type of information, the more meaningful results we can achieve.

Accurat –Giorgia Lupi, Gabriele Rossi, Nicola Guidoboni, Giovanni Magni, Lorenzo Marchionni, Andrea Titton, Alessandro Zotta, 2019,

Accurat couples high-end design with low-level data, crafting intelligent, user-centric solutions for global leaders in business, government, and media.

We work collaboratively with our clients to uncover key organizational challenges, develop new processes and workflows, and deploy internal and external data visualizations, interfaces, and tools that drive insight and engagement