What we’ve learned from four years of self-initiated exhibitions

In September 2013, as part of London Design Festival, we held our first exhibition.

We wanted to give our team a chance to create work that wasn’t related to a client brief: a chance to experiment with new development technologies, to pick a topic that we were interested in as an agency and to let the public see data design where they may not have been aware of it before.

We held ‘Less than a second’ where we set ourselves the challenge of visualising things that happen in less than a second. We hired a space in Shoreditch and invited friends, clients and opened it up to the public. It was an experiment for us: we wanted to test the appetite for our work with people who may not have seen it before. We hoped that people would enjoy seeing the detail and analysis in the pieces, so we waited for them to turn up.

Thankfully they did. People seemed genuinely interested in the ways of visualising data that weren’t the standard pie charts or excel documents. We looked around and noticed that there weren’t many other data-driven design shows happening in London, or globally, so we decided that this was something that could help raise the profile of data design as a whole.

The following year we chose algorithms as the topic for the exhibition. There were more and more algorithmic processes being used by our clients, and the idea of visualising a topic so complicated and making it into art inspired us. ‘Art of the Algorithm’ looked at many different types of algorithms: Facebook, music algorithms and high frequency trading, to name a few. We pushed ourselves to try and make these invisible phenomena visible, and not only that, but to capture people’s attention enough to try and explain how they work.

Our reputation for data design exhibitions had grown and at the same time people were becoming more data literate and receptive to data visualisation in general. It was much more a part of journalism, communication materials and online content.

In 2015, with data becoming a bigger part of people’s lives, issues of ownership and privacy were in the newspapers every day. People’s awareness of their own data was growing, and they were also aware of how valuable it was to big companies.

With that in mind, we planned ‘private i’. This exhibition looked at the different sides of digital privacy: allowing visitors to decide whether they wanted to opt in, or opt out. We visualised datasets to ask questions about who owns your data, provoke discussions on data ethics and explore the potential societal benefits of big data.

This September we held our fourth exhibition. We initially started with the topic of predictive analytics. Being able to predict the future, from the data that you have collected, is a concept that we find fascinating. In theory, we can predict natural disasters, where crimes will happen and what will make us money. But in the planning process something happened which no data scientist or media broadcaster would have been confident predicting. The UK voted to leave the European Union.

This made us think about what can be predicted by data, and how a lot of events are still unpredictable. As a London based data design agency, we were interested in the huge disparity that was apparent from the voting results. London seemingly thinks in a different way to the rest of the UK. And we’re in the minority.

So we decided to change the focus of our exhibition to London; using the data that we have to predict what will happen in London in the next 30 years. We took datasets and used data design to produce pieces that made predictions about the future of our city. We also — crucially — included the opportunity for our audience to make their own predictions. We asked them to place their bets.

‘Place your bets’ was a chance for Londoners (and others) to examine the data-driven content and decide whether or not they agreed. They could tweak algorithms, express their views on gentrification, and decide how long they will continue to live in London. The conversations that we had with visitors were as interesting as the pieces themselves; armed with data people can make much more accurate predictions, and we can learn a lot from their sentiments.

For ‘Place your bets’ we developed fortune-telling bots which printed life predictions when texted, we looked at the future of mental health, transport, gentrification and even what will happen to the Pokémon that evade capture. There’s data about every topic, so we can visualise almost anything.

Looking back over the last four events, it’s a chance to reflect on why we are still doing these exhibitions:

1. We can show our work to an audience who haven’t experienced data design before. In doing this we need to show complex ideas in a simple and clear way.

2. We get to ask people questions about important topics and capture their feedback, inform discussions and spark interest.

3. We are able to use physical mediums of data visualisations alongside digital pieces. Sometimes when people can interact with a dataset by placing a sticker, tying a string or casting a vote they engage with the story more.

4. We can improve our own creative process by allowing ourselves to think critically about the work.

As an agency, creating a body of work together gives us something to be proud of. An enormous amount of effort goes into each exhibition, but we derive an enormous amount of pleasure sharing the work with people who come and see it.

If you didn’t get a chance to come along to ‘Place your bets’ this year, have a look at the online version here.