Your Next Hidden Opportunity: Finding the Human Angle in Metadata
by Justin Massa
Spend any amount of time with a toddler and you’ll likely observe them sorting things. My daughter loved to do this, and the way in which she sorted her toys, markers, books, or random stuff she picked up was always fascinating. “Things that should be able to fly” and “things that would look better in purple” were among my favorites. She would line them up, inspect them, tweak their organization, and then eventually pick them all up, only to be re-sorted again.
Kids who creatively sort items are actually playing with metadata.They’re organizing toys through unique or invented types of attributes of an object, arranging them into neat rows and columns. “These are all dinosaur fingernails (aka semicircle blocks), from biggest to smallest.”
What does that have to do with metadata?
It’s long been my belief that you can tell the data expert from the casual data enthusiast by how quickly they ask for the metadata. Put short, metadata is “the data about the data.” It’s everything from the filename and extension to the “data dictionary” that explains a collection methodology or individual datum naming conventions. Column headers are the metadata, the value in each individual cell is the datum. (Side note: Using terms like “datum” and “these data” rather than “this data” are other surefire ways to identify data nerds.)
Metadata is how we know that an EKG reading is describing a human rather than a horse. Without metadata, most data is useless.
While most of the focus is on various ways of visualizing the 1s and 0s that make up a data set, there’s unexplored opportunity for designers to add, subtract, and create types of values that might be assigned to data points — the metadata. If we apply design thinking to how we sort and classify objects or behaviors, it opens up an entire world of insight that typical approaches to data and analytics will never uncover.
Read the rest of the article in IDEO’s Design x Data series here.
