Data and Creativity don’t have to be strangers. We’re reuniting them at London Data Unit.

We’re a London-based practice of data-scientist + design thinker hybrids. We collaborate and consult with industry and government partners to develop custom data and intelligence products.

We believe true innovation comes when people approach complex business problems in a clear and practical way. Combining deep-level understanding of knowledge and business domain, design & behaviour and the substantive value of data science.

Critically, people who can execute their thinking in the real world.

Though these people are in short supply, at London Data Unit we’ve assembled a few and they’re ready to bring their skills to bear on your knottiest challenges.

Our current projects include working with…

• An industrial real estate intelligence platform for one of the largest global asset managers.
• A massively parallelised content personalisation engine for a disruptive social content agency.
• Real-time object recognition for a well known retail innovator.
• An open-source population-model for logicians and supply-chain consultants.
• A needs based comparison algorithm for determining optimal London residential locations.

We share as much as we can get away with, but a lot has to stay under wraps with the clients.

Data & Creativity: a unified approach

If you hired a photographer you would expect that they be both creatively talented and technically proficient — to be able to understand both the context, framing and brief whilst being able to execute and utilise their technology to its fullest degree. Why don’t we expect the same when an innovation problem that relies on data?

Too often creativity and data are strangers.

Upstream, designers and strategists often don’t fully grasp the transformative capacity of data & data science from project’s outset. On the flipside, data scientists are not always exposed to the underlying principles and objectives of the long term vision and brief.

Inevitably the end solution suffers.

We bridge this gap by connecting decades of experience and knowledge as founders, strategists, designers and engineers with hands-on data science capabilities — everyone here writes code. The output is a true hybrid offering — thinking and execution. We maintain a simple interface with our partners’, working on their business problems in their language and we pair it with an innovative outcome driven process that is equal parts creativity and data science.

This has 2 key effects that differentiate us:

The ideas we pitch and build are ideas that could only ever emanate from people who understand and can shape data as a creative and incisive medium.

Partners are never pitched an ‘impossible-to-create’ AI by an overexcited creative. We are accountable for our ideas.

If we pitch it, we can build it.

If this sounds like something you or your business could benefit from or you have an interesting idea you would like to collaborate on — get in touch with us at hello@londondataunit.com.