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Few things are more vital to a city than safe, accessible fresh water. More than 20% of the world’s population lives in areas where access to clean, fresh water is challenging. It’s obvious: Healthy cities need reliable clean water to thrive. But how do we achieve that critical goal of safe, secure water supplies for...

It’s no secret that the field of cartography has been going through some pretty serious change lately, and that a lot of this change is happening because of work being done here in the Bay Area. San Francisco-based nonprofit think tank SPUR has been tracking developments in the field and doing a lot to get...

Greetings from Berlin. Earlier this week I was in Turkey, where I’d spent the last week coordinating the install of our curation, Mapmaker Manifesto. The second Istanbul Design Biennial opened to the public on November 1. Produced by iKSV, one of Istanbul’s, if not Turkey’s, largest arts foundations, the event worked with over 50 artists,...

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...

STAMEN DESIGN MAPS OUT EXPANSION FOR LEADERSHIP IN THE FIELD OF DATA VISUALIZATION:NAMES JON CHRISTENSEN AS PARTNER & OPENS NEW OFFICE IN LOS ANGELES;ANNOUNCES GROUNDBREAKING SOCIAL SENSE-MAKING, ENVIRONMENTAL & MASS MEDIA PROJECTS SAN FRANCISCO, CA, September 3, 2014 — Stamen Design, known for award-winning design in the field of data visualization and its beautiful and technologically sophisticated...

In 2010, Stamen was awarded a Knight News Grant to build tools that help people tell better stories about cities. I’m pleased to announce that we’ve been awarded another grant from Knight to extend and support this project, as follows: Terrain layers, at all zoom levels, outside the US Transfer the hosting and processing to...

Two weeks ago, we were horrified to learn that our friend and Stamen alum Zach Watson was fighting for his life after having been the victim of a car crash that injured six people in the Tenderloin. He’s been in critical condition since then. I’m so very sorry to have to tell you that Zach...

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,...