Over the last week or so I was honored to participate in events at three institutions, which in some ways couldn’t have been more different: the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, metalab at Harvard, and the Bolinas Museum. MoMA Full Disclosure: The Edge of Information Design, MoMA’s first show devoted entirely to...
This article first appeared in Harvard Design Magazine on May 4, 2026. While the first article in this series on artificial intelligence (AI) explored how designers may be uniquely positioned to confront the technology’s implications, this second essay examines AI as a design medium—one that can reshape how designers think and produce knowledge. Eric Rodenbeck, a lecturer in...
I’m thrilled to announce that Harvard’s Graduate School of Design has invited me to teach a second semester long workshop! It’s called Re-imagining the Archive, and we’ll be engaging with the holdings of prominent institutions like MoMA and Harvard Art Museums to investigate the intersection of culture, technology and society. We recently published a “studio”...
This summer I had the honor of speaking at DATA | ART, an event at MIT and sponsored by MetaLab at Harvard and Northeastern University, that gathers practitioners who live in the liminal space between “what is data” and “what becomes art.” The conversation often revolves around the tension between precision and poetry, between representation...
The State of the Map US (SOTMUS) 2025 conference in Boston, MA was yet another fantastic gathering of cartographers, mappers, and map enthusiasts. Stamen was well-represented this year by Kelsey Taylor, Eric Brelsford, and Eric Rodenbeck. We presented two talks on Stamen projects related to open source tooling with maps. Now that we’re back in...
by Robbyn Layne A designer and three scientists walk into a bar… well, actually, it wasn’t a bar. And what happened when they sat down together wasn’t a joke! It was an inspiring testament to the power of data visualization and synergistic collaborations that merge beauty with utility, or rather, design with science. Eric Rodenbeck,...
Last Friday I had the pleasure of being hosted by Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Curators Matilda McQuaid, Andrea Lipps and Cindy Trope at a visit to Cooper Hewitt in New York City. They’ve acquired our watercolor maps into the permanent collection of the Smithsonian! And they’re on display in the galleries. So I called up my...
The North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS) 2023 conference in Pittsburgh was a fantastic gathering of cartographers, mappers, and map enthusiasts. Stamen was well-represented this year by Kelsey Taylor, Eric Rodenbeck, and Ross Thorn. I’m developing a history with NACIS, having given my first talk there last year on cartography and the golden ratio, and...
Mention the term “discovery phase” in a room full of product managers, analysts, executives, entrepreneurs, or developers, and you’re certain to garner myriad responses: everything from nods of agreement and appreciation to rolling eyes and exasperated sighs. In fact, in the design and development process of digital products, there’s perhaps no phase that is more...