Multi
Bright — blues, reds, and ochre on warm stone.
Giorgia LupiArtist collaboration
Unraveling Stories · Giorgia Lupi × Well Woven
Some of these crafts are almost gone — knowledge passed hand to hand for centuries, now down to a handful of makers. Data artist Giorgia Lupi took 59 of them, drawn from UNESCO's record of endangered heritage, and wove each into a thread of color you can read — so the stories live somewhere you'll see them every day.
Why we made this
Every year the world loses a few more of the crafts it took centuries to learn — a way of weaving, a way of dyeing, a knot known to only a handful of hands. War, migration, a changing climate, the rush of mass production: the reasons differ, but the ending is the same. Most of these traditions will never reach a museum. Most of us will never even hear their names.
Well Woven makes washable rugs built for real life — kids, pets, spills and all. We don't think a rug has to only cover a floor; it can also keep something. So when data artist Giorgia Lupi came to talk with us about her work, a bigger idea took shape: weave the crafts the world is losing into something a family actually lives on — so the stories stay in the room, out in the open, every day.
That's what Unraveling Stories is. Not a pattern — a small act of remembering, in a thing you can walk on.
“These rugs are not just decorative pieces, but pieces of history to own.”
The hand behind it
Giorgia Lupi turns numbers into things you can feel. Where most of us see a spreadsheet, she sees people — and a way to draw them. She calls it data humanism: data is never just figures on a screen, but a language for the human stories underneath. Unraveling Stories is one of those stories, drawn in thread.
What drives me is the space between logic and beauty.
Read the pattern
Nothing here is decoration. Every band stands for one real craft, and everything about it means something — its color, its reach, its lines. Trace the rug band by band and meet them all.
Run your cursor down the rug — or tap a band
59 techniques · aligned to the printed key · Multi colorway
The atlas underfoot
Every horizontal band on the rug stands for one endangered craft. Hover or tap a band, use the arrow keys, or step through them one by one.
Names, order, threat, and age are read from the rug's printed key, which ships with every rug; origins and fibers are drawn from UNESCO and craft-heritage records. The key also encodes each stripe's reach — its level of threat.
Color = the danger
Each color names what threatens a craft — aging makers, war, poor pay, a lost method, the factory, scarce material, or migration.
Reach = the urgency
The farther a band stretches across the rug, the closer that craft is to being lost.
Thin lines = the age
Count the thin lines for age — three means the craft is more than a thousand years old.
Shaded lines = the fiber
Shaded lines tell you what it's made from: plant, animal, or both.
White bars = the place
White bars place the craft on the map, from South America to Africa.
The printed key
A printed card comes with the rug: the front teaches the five signals, the back lists all 59 techniques in the order they appear in the weave. The decoder above is its on-screen twin.
View the key's front at full size (opens in a new tab)
View the key's back at full size (opens in a new tab)Art you can live on
Work like this usually lives behind glass. This one lives on your floor — built to shrug off real life. That's the whole point.
Guests will ask about it — and you'll have 59 answers. Every band is a real craft with a real story.
Red wine on a museum piece is a tragedy. Here, it's a cleanup — stain-resistant throughout, machine washable in the 5'3" x 7'3" size.
A low flat weave that slips under doors and shrugs off claws, crumbs, and daily traffic.
Designed by Giorgia Lupi with Pentagram and woven under license — not a print of a print.
Made to live with
Walking on it is how it works. Lupi put these stories in a rug — not a tapestry, not a print — so they'd live where you do. Stain-resistant, low-profile, and genuinely good for homes with kids and pets. Add a rug pad (sold separately) and put it where you'll see it, and spill on it, every day.
About the artist
Giorgia Lupi is a partner at Pentagram — the world's largest independent design studio — and the rare artist who has made data itself her medium. Born in Modena, Italy, she studied architecture and earned a PhD in design before co-founding the data studio Accurat and, in 2019, joining Pentagram in New York. Today she lives and works in Brooklyn.
Her hand-drawn data lives in the permanent collection of MoMA, and her TED talk on data humanism has been watched more than a million times. In 2022 she won the United States' National Design Award — the first data-visualization designer ever named in its communication-design category — and her visual New York Times piece charting her own recovery from long COVID won the Compasso d'Oro, Italy's most prestigious design award. Her work has been commissioned by Google, IBM, the Gates Foundation, the World Health Organization, and the United Nations.
That is who designed your rug. Unraveling Stories isn't a pattern pulled from a mood board — it's an original work by a world-renowned artist, encoded thread by thread. You're not buying a rug that looks like art. You're bringing home the art itself, made to be lived on.
The making of
Watch how Giorgia Lupi and her team at Pentagram turned a record of vanishing crafts into a work of data visualization you can live on — a pattern you can read, woven as a rug you can live with. And woven on purpose, not printed: a rug about weaving, made as a woven object, in tribute to Anni Albers and the geometry of the loom.
Two moods, one story
Bright — blues, reds, and ochre on warm stone.
Quiet — lavenders and grays for a calmer room.
Good to know
A flat-weave area rug whose pattern is a dataset. Giorgia Lupi and her team at Pentagram mapped 59 endangered textile-making traditions — drawn from UNESCO's record of intangible cultural heritage — into a single woven design, where every color, line, and band carries meaning.
The 5'3" x 7'3" size is fully machine washable. For larger sizes we recommend professional cleaning — and every size is stain-resistant and easy to spot-clean, made for spills, paws, and all.
Two colorways — Multi (bright) and Lavender (quiet) — in a range of sizes starting at 5'3" x 7'3". Every size and price is listed in the shop section above. Both colorways tell the same story.
A soft, low-profile polyester-chenille flat weave on a recycled-cotton backing that is gentle on hardwood and tile. Thin enough to slip under a door, soft enough to sit on. A rug pad (sold separately) is recommended.
Ready-to-ship rugs can be returned within 14 days if they're unused and in original condition — no hoops. Shipping is free on orders over $99.
An Italian-born, Brooklyn-based information designer and a partner at the design studio Pentagram. She has spent her career turning data into things people can feel — work held in MoMA's permanent collection and published on the front page of The New York Times. Her philosophy, data humanism, starts from one idea: data is always made by people, about people.
They are a code, not decoration. Each band is one craft; its color names the threat to it, how far it reaches across the rug marks how endangered it is, thin lines count its age, shaded lines mark its fiber, and white bars place it on the map. The printed key that comes with every rug walks you through it.
Yes. The 59 traditions are real textile-making techniques recognized as at-risk — from Azerbaijani carpet weaving to an Andean cross-looping older than the Inca. The point of the rug is to keep their stories visible.
Project credits
Unraveling Stories
Bring home an original Giorgia Lupi built for real life — and keep 59 disappearing crafts somewhere you'll see them every day.
Bring it home
ColorLavender
2 colorsShips with the printed story tag · free shipping over $99 · 14-day returns · pairs with a rug pad.
Unraveling Stories by Giorgia Lupi
Lavender / 5'3" x 7'3"
$249.98
Lavender / 5'3" x 7'3"