blog/Process

This year, the Istanbul Design Biennial has chosen the theme The Future is Not What it Used To Be. When they opened the call for participation back in January, they asked for manifestos of any form — words, videos, artworks, anything that spoke to this theme. So theMapmaker Manifesto was born. This manifesto demands that we look...

Climate change, though we know it’s there, is a hard thing to see: it’s slow, it’s invisible, and if you don’t know what you’re looking for, then you might not even miss it once its gone. Birds, however, are often hard to miss: they can be loud, bright, beautiful, strange. It turns out that by...

This summer, I’m working on a Creative Code Fellowship with Stamen Design, Gray Area and Autodesk. The project is called Water Works, which will map and data-visualize the San Francisco water infrastructure using 3D-printing and the web. Finding water data is harder than I thought. Like detective Gittes in the movie Chinatown, I’m poking my...

Outside our own kitchens, gas leaks aren’t something we’d ever thought much about here at Stamen. But being a studio filled with progressive San Francisco do-gooders and all, we do think about climate change and sustainability. We also think an inordinate amount about all the sensors out in the world gathering data — satellites, airplanes, cellphones, Jawbones,...

We’ve been quiet about something cooking here at Stamen, in part because it’s new and experimental, and in part because we’ve been so busy doing it that we haven’t made time to write yet. That something is our Education program, run by Beth. It was taking baby steps throughout the spring, and this summer it’s...

Stamen has long aspired to make it easier for people everywhere to visualize data, particularly on and with maps. In our recent partnership with Tableau, we’ve helped to improve a tool that does just that. Tableau’s latest version, 8.2, comes complete with a mapping suite designed by us. Suddenly it’s that much easier for people...

This year, people across California began getting health insurance coverage in new ways, thanks to President Barack Obama’s signature Affordable Care Act, often called Obamacare. As the new marketplaces, subsidies, and penalties got discussed and debated in the media this spring, we at Stamen were hard at work with our frequent client the California Healthcare...

Here at Stamen, we’ve been doing more works for and about parks, first our map for the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy and then our own parks and social media experiment at parks.stamen.com. We love parks! I especially love parks. I spent almost a decade telling stories of local parks and wildlife for Bay Nature...

Climate change is one of those things that can be so invisible, and in some cases so subtle, that it can be hard to conceptualize. Over the years, our work with Climate Central has sought to make one symptom of this looming problem — sea level rise — much easier to see. The maps we’ve made together reveal what’s...

What happens when you map the social media footprint of the great outdoors? Last month, Stamen launched parks.stamen.com, a project we created in partnership with the Electric Roadrunner Lab, with the goal of revealing the diversity of social media activity that happens inside parks and other open spaces in California. If you haven’t already looked...