Has anything like this ever happened to you? It might not seem like it, but these stories are likely the impacts of a poor resource management decision. Ecosystems are composed of an extremely complicated web of plants, animals, microscopic organisms, fungi, people, precipitation, and so much more. When the abundance of one component changes, the...
Perhaps you’ve noticed over the past decade how that “once in a century” forest fire or hurricane seems to be appearing in the news more often than its name would imply. With temperatures increasing due to climate change, natural disasters are increasing in both frequency and intensity across the world. In these situations, it’s of...
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...
Imagine you’re going out of town this weekend. You check the weather forecast where you’re headed and see clear, sunny days, so you make sure you pack your sunglasses in your bag. Next, you check the public health trends where you’re going and see COVID-19 is high. So, you tuck away your face mask next...
In August 2023, Stamen started working with the Economic Innovation Group (EIG), a bipartisan public policy organization dedicated to forging a more dynamic and inclusive American economy. The focus of our work was their keystone product, the Distressed Communities Index (DCI) interactive dashboard. The DCI highlights economic disparities in U.S. communities at several geographic levels,...
Dealing with the occasional 100-year storm or drought are problems farmers have had to deal with for centuries, but what happens when those weather events become the norm? Climate change will test agriculture practices across the globe in ways humans can’t fully predict. Many country’s harvests are already feeling these effects and will continue to...
The Max Planck Institute hired Stamen a few years back to create a website to visualize increasingly complex urban transformations due to immigration for a project called Superdiversity. The site we created contains multiple interactive charts of census data to enable better research, analysis, and discussion of this novel phenomenon. Because diversity patterns in cities...
As we mentioned recently, Stamen worked with Densho in 2023 to create Manzanar CloseUp, a map of the Manzanar concentration camp in California where Japanese Americans were incarcerated during WWII. Where our previous work on Sites of Shame visualizes all of the camps that existed and the aggregated movement of individuals to and from camps,...
Back in 2021, Stamen began working with Densho, a nonprofit committed to documenting the oral histories of Japanese Americans who were incarcerated on American soil during WWII. Together, we worked to tell the stories of the 125,000 imprisoned individuals through a map-based visualization called Sites of Shame. In 2023, we collaborated again to develop Manzanar...
When we started thinking about how to recreate Stamen’s iconic Toner and Terrain raster styles with vector data, Toner seemed like it would present the bigger challenge. Achieving the right hierarchy and visual balance of that style felt like a monumental task to me, an ardent admirer of Toner for many years. Terrain was less...