{
  "id": 10200225,
  "title": "MoMA explores the useful beauty of information design",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/09/27/moma-explores-the-useful-beauty-of-information-design",
  "topic": "culture",
  "section": "Culture",
  "published": "2026-09-27T11:00:00.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Fast Company",
    "slug": "fast-company",
    "url": "https://www.fastcompany.com/91612965/moma-explores-the-useful-beauty-of-information-design"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is set to unveil its upcoming exhibition, Full Disclosure: The Edge of Information Design, which explores the useful beauty of information design. Senior curator Paola Antonelli explains that the pieces in the exhibition \"tell us the fact that the museum is always ready to understand what’s important to the world in that particular moment, and to try to give the best examples of it.\" One of the first pieces visitors will see upon entering the museum is Ed Hawkins' Warming Stripes, a visual representation of global warming through a progression of blue to red stripes representing the average temperature of each year. This piece exemplifies the field of information design, which takes complex scientific data and renders it comprehensible to a wide audience.\n\nThe exhibition will also delve into personal data, featuring a correspondence between artists Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec. Their Dear Data project showcases how they creatively visualized aspects of their lives, such as the number of times they cursed in a week. This portion of the exhibit highlights how information design can help people connect on a more personal or even playful level with the data that symbolizes their lives.\n\nMoMA has been collecting works of information design since 2008, during Antonelli's debut exhibition, Design and the Elastic Mind, which focused on how designers adapted to revolutionary scientific changes. All but one piece in Full Disclosure: The Edge of Information Design are part of MoMA's collection. While the origins of information design as a practice can be traced back to the invention of the bar chart or Dr. John Snow's cholera map, Antonelli believes its roots go further, stating that it has always been a part of the human experience due to our innate desire to explain things in a narrative and visual way.\n\nThe use of computers and digital tools has greatly expanded the practice of information design, and the exhibition reflects this with massive pieces that take up entire walls, such as Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler's Calculating Empires, which spans an entire room. Newspapers and media companies, including The New York Times, also contribute to the exhibition with works that use 3-D rendering and recreations of historical events to convey complex information in an accessible and engaging way. MoMA's first-ever exhibition focused entirely on information design aims to serve as a gentle provocation or surprise reminder that everyday works found in newspapers are museum-worthy. By showcasing these examples, Antonelli hopes to foster a better sense of discernment among visitors and encourage a more critical examination of the infographics and diagrams they encounter daily.",
  "summary": "When people post infographics on their Instagram accounts, they’re sharing information and facts about the world with their followers. They’re also trying to convey something about the kind of person they are by distributing these aesthetically pleasing, digestible bites of data. Perhaps they want to make a statement about their own politics or conscientiousness. So what is the Museum of Modern…",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}