MTA + Pentagram
I love this piece commissioned by New York City’s Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) Arts & Design department for its 40th anniversary.
Each subway line becomes a character in this moving work - A Data Love Letter to the Subway - by the Data Driven Experience team at Pentagram.
These motion graphics visualize each train as an individual line whose unique attributes (age, length, path, interactions) are extracted from MTA operational data.
Instead of just showing moving lines, you get a kind of story across the network - where trains intersect, diverge, connect.
The illustrations are black and white, with a hand-drawn feel. The choice is both aesthetic and practical, to counter the visual noise of Fulton Street Center station where it is installed.
The graphics run on a data repository using open data from the MTA and other records like the Missed Connection boards. Pentagram wrote a narrative/script that extracts the stories from the data rather than simply generating charts.
The work transforms what many consider a mundane (even frustrating) part of everyday life - riding the subway - into a kind of visual poetry of infrastructure, movement and interaction.
The work spans 52 screens and plays at the top of every hour. It is on view until January 5, 2026.
Data Love Letter is an excellent example of how Pentagram's Data Driven Experiences practice reframes data into human-centered, spatial communication.
The firm describes DDX as a discipline in which data becomes a design material: rather than simply visualizing numbers in charts or dashboards, the practice aims to make the invisible world of data “vivid, compelling and human.”
Pentagram sees the DDX practice as a growth opportunity due to the ubiquity of data, the differentiation of human-centered data design, cross-sector relevance, and a new convergence of data + experience needs in the marketplace.
Check out the project page to meet the team headed by Giorgia Lupi, watch an explainer video, view the full artwork, the data sandbox, concept sketches and more:
https://www.pentagram.com/work/a-data-love-letter-to-the-subway