In "A Data Love Letter to the Subway," Giorgia Lupi visualizes each train line as a character whose unique qualities are extracted from MTA data. Imaginatively animating each line’s age, length, and path, Lupi explores their interwoven encounters with commuters and one another. By turning the overfamiliar into a poetic narrative, Lupi’s "Love Letter" reveals the connections that hum in the background of our shared urban life.

Drawn to the beauty of the trains’ intersections, movements, and idiosyncrasies, Lupi sought to unveil the visual poetry of transit infrastructure. Abstracting the trains’ data culled from the MTA Open Data program and missed connections boards, the animation provides a rich view of the trains’ interactions, roles, differences, connections, and missed opportunities. In essence, it reveals what the data actually represents: their behaviors. Riding the subway is a collective experience, and a plurality of stories emerge when we rub shoulders with other commuting New Yorkers. Within these stories, the trains play an integral role — their doors close as we lock eyes with someone on the platform, or a skipped stop leads us to a conversation with a stranger. Lupi’s Love Letter prompts us to think about the subway as the backdrop and architect of these interactions.

Giorgia Lupi is an award-winning designer and a partner at Pentagram’s New York studio. Trained as an architect at Università degli Studi di Ferrara, she earned her PhD in Design from Politecnico di Milano; in 2022 she received an honorary doctorate in Fine Arts from MICA, the Maryland Institute College of Art. Lupi was the 2022 recipient of the National Design Award from the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum; and the 2025 recipient of the Compasso d'Oro for her visual op-ed "My Life with Long Covid." Her work is in the permanent collection of MoMA and the Cooper Hewitt.

In her practice, Lupi and her team create vibrant visual data-driven narratives across print, environmental, and digital media that forge new insight and appreciation of people, ideas, and organizations.