I will be talking Big (Beautiful) Data at Stanford
As a part of Edelman's New Media Academic Summit at Stanford, I will be joining AllThingsD's Drake Martinet, Meltwater's Jorn Lyseggen and Edelman's Chris Lightner on June 22nd to talk about the aesthetic side of big data.
My topline POV: the investment to date in the big data space has been "under the surface" -- the funding is going to hire more engineers and PhDs to write and develop the algorithms and systems to collect, process and store the massive amounts of data we are creating through just about everything we do in the modern world.
While visual and UX designers are clearly a part of the equation, my hypothesis is that they:
(1) do not have a big enough seat at the table and
(2) might not be best in class (i.e., the "below the surface" focus means that the financial, recruitment and even cultural emphasis on engineers comes at the cost of top designers).
From here, I posit that future investments will:
(1) increasingly go to hiring best in class designers who can visually display the data "above surface" with higher levels of efficacy than what the market currently offers in terms of interface design and user experience and
(2) demand that designers have a bigger seat at the table (cf. #8 in my SlideShare embedded below).
Looking forward to the conversation later this month.
Author’s notes:
Originally posted on my Tumblr here [June 10, 2012]
A fun and somewhat Stanford-related post-factual point: I would go on to have my writing on the topic of data literacy be featured in a 2017 book by Scott Hartley titled: The Fuzzy and the Techie: Why the Liberal Arts Will Rule the Digital World for my ideas that were incubated at j3 and from this panel discussion (and drawn from a 2012–2014 essay I wrote with assistance from Simon Steinhardt titled Beyond Data Science: Advancing Data Literacy).
See below for the 3 pages in which my ideas appear:
The Fuzzy & the Techie, page 53.
The Fuzzy & the Techie, page 54.
The Fuzzy & the Techie, page 55.
