Eric Rodenbeck

“I’ve been wrong so often I don’t find it extraordinary at all.”
—Ronald Coase

Eric Rodenbeck is the founder of Stamen, an award-winning design and technology studio based in San Francisco, and a professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Under Eric’s leadership for more than twenty years, Stamen’s work has helped to define the emerging world of online mapping and data visualization. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Bloomberg, Vice, Scientific American, and many other publications. The Dalai Lama trusted him to make maps of what science knows about human emotions, the Getty trusted him to help tell the world about Ed Ruscha’s hundreds of thousands of automatic photographs of Los Angeles, Facebook trusted him to tell stories about human mobility during COVID, and the Audubon society trusted him to make maps of North American bird ranges in different client change scenarios. Radically interdisciplinary and collaborative, his work has been featured in galleries and museums around the world, and is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Smithsonian. An amateur geometer, ink maker, fermenter and knot tyer, he has taught workshops in each of these areas and relishes the interplay between the digital and the physical, the controlled and the wild.

In 2017 Stamen was awarded the National Design Award for Interaction Design by the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Museum. You can read his academic papers, “Communications Principles for Inviting Inquiry and Exploration Through Science and Data Visualization,” here, and “Seeing the System: Data Visualization as Critical Practice,” here. You can listen to his recent interview with science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson for City Arts & Lectures here.