A proud alumnus of the New School, Eric Rodenbeck is the founder of Stamen, an award-winning design and technology studio, and Lecturer in Architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. For more than twenty years, under Eric’s leadership, Stamen’s work has helped shape the practices, aesthetics, and public understanding of online mapping and data visualization.

When interfaces break, explode, or fail, they reveal how data is structured, bounded, and contested. Rather than treating failure as error to be smoothed away, this talk approaches gaps, seams, and breakdowns in data visualization as sources of inquiry, investigation, and revelation. Drawing on projects that engage volatile territories, incomplete archives, and uneven infrastructures, the talk argues for an ecstatic data visualization practice that learns from instability and embraces the knowledge produced when systems are pushed beyond their limits.

Radically interdisciplinary and collaborative, Eric’s 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 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 at this link and Seeing the System: Data Visualization as Critical Practice at this link.