Practitioner in Residence: Stefanie Posavec

Data artist Stefanie Posavec works with everyday data, visualising results to make ‘big data’ accessible to a range of audiences.

Stefanie's residency at Royal Museums Greenwich

In 2018 Royal Museums Greenwich launched a new wing of the National Maritime Museum, opening four new galleries. With audience participation at the heart of these new spaces, we invited Stefanie to interrogate visitor generated data to give us a greater understanding of how people interact and what their interests are.

Stefanie was inspired by the ships' badges which are on display directly outside the studio space. In collaboration with data analyst Miriam Quick, Stefanie spent time in the Museum collecting data and designing a visual key to represent the key elements that make up the Museum’s visitors. A ‘fleet’ of visitor badges was created, assigning ship names to personalities and grouping them together to build a picture of visitors to the Museum.  

Find out more about Stefanie's work

Titled Passing Ships: a celebration of the visitor fleet, Stefanie's artwork showcased the unique and diverse identities of the fleet of visitors who passed through the doors of the Museum every day. The artwork was made using data gathered from 571 Museum visitors surveyed in February 2019. The survey collected demographic information and asked respondents about their personalities using questions based on a personality test called Big Five (OCEAN).

Stefanie then visualised the data in the form of ships' badges. Each badge represented one word a visitor used to describe themselves in the survey. This word became the badge's name. Badges were organised into different 'flotillas', such as happy ships or rescue ships, based on the type of word chosen.

Hear Stefanie talk about her residency

Discover more about Stefanie's work at stefanieposavec.com