As Director and co-founder of Small Multiples, Andrea Lau is a data-visualisation specialist. In their words, they are a multidisciplinary team of data specialists, designers and developers, helping people make the best use of their data. Flyn and Matt unashamedly use this as an opportunity to dig into what data is, and how the visualisation of it is affecting many of our day to day decisions. Thankfully, Andrea is incredibly passionate about the education of data and raising everyone’s data literacy, having taught courses and workshops in this area — so, she was accommodating and incredibly informative.

We also spend some time on what it’s like to run a niche studio in an emerging area and why data specialists are becoming such hot property. Towards the end, we discuss the crossover point between data visualisation and art and look at how, as a studio, Small Multiples is trying to present data in non-typical ways — in boutique chocolates for example.

As always special thanks to Streamtime for their steadfast support and motivation. If you haven’t tried their software yet, well, you’re wasting time, literally.

Special thanks to John Allsopp from web directions for connecting us with Andrea.

Links:

Streamtime streamtime.net

Small Multiples: www.smallmultiples.com.au

Visualise Today: www.blog.smallmultiples.com.au

Bakedown Cakery: www.bakedowncakery.com

Hello Sun: www.hellosunapp.com

Not A single Origin: https://notasingleorigin.com

Immigrant maps: https://smallmultiples.com.au/projects/mapping-immigrants-birth-places

Framework for designing amazing maps: https://smallmultiples.com.au/articles/what-to-think-about-when-designing-maps

School planning: https://smallmultiples.com.au/projects/school-planning-assistance-tool

Tim Berners-Lee and data: https://5stardata.info/en/ and https://solid.inrupt.com

We Feel Fine: http://wefeelfine.org/ and http://number27.org/wefeelfine