Pau Aleikum Garcia is a designer and researcher who turns data into something people can feel. He is the co-founder and director of Domestic Data Streamers, a Barcelona-based studio known for transforming numbers, records and testimonies into physical, participatory experiences.
Garcia’s work began with a simple frustration. Data was shaping lives, policies and public opinion, yet most people never truly engaged with it. Over the past decade, he set out to change that. Domestic Data Streamers has delivered more than 400 projects across over 60 countries, working in places as varied as schools, prisons, museums and the United Nations Headquarters. The studio’s work has been shown at institutions including MoMA, the Barbican and the California Academy of Sciences.
A defining moment in Pau Garcia’s work came during the European refugee crisis. Volunteering in Athens, he met a Syrian grandmother who had lost nearly all her family photographs while fleeing war. Her fear was not displacement, but erasure. Her grandchildren would grow up without a visual memory of where they came from. That encounter stayed with him. Years later, it became the foundation of Synthetic Memories, a project that uses AI to recreate lost images based on personal interviews and emotional recall.
Synthetic Memories does not aim to recreate history or produce perfect images. It does something more powerful. It gives people proof that their memories matter. The project has been used with refugees, elderly communities and people living with dementia, and is now being explored as a tool for reminiscence therapy. The images are intentionally fragile and incomplete, reflecting how memory really works.
Alongside his studio practice, Garcia is deeply committed to education. He directs and chairs postgraduate programmes at ELISAVA University and lectures internationally, including at the Royal College of Art and the School of Visual Arts in New York. He is also the founder of HeyHuman!, an artist residency supporting work at the intersection of music, journalism, data and social justice.
Pau Garcia believes that design shouldn’t just explain the world, it should help people recognise themselves within it.
