In this week’s episode of the PolicyViz Podcast, I sit down with data visualization expert Moritz Stefaner to reflect on his journey in the field. We discuss Stefaner’s work on the Data Stories Podcast, his shift from bespoke data visualization projects to scalable design systems, and his collaborations with organizations like the World Health Organization. Moritz shares insights on the evolution of data visualization trends, the importance of clear communication, and the challenges of building sustainable design frameworks.
Resources
Explore all of Mortiz’s amazing work on his website
Guest Bio
As a self-employed “Truth and Beauty Operator”, Moritz Stefaner keeps chasing the perfect shape for information.
With a background in Cognitive Science and Interface Design, his work beautifully balances analytical and aesthetic aspects in mapping complex phenomena to support data–driven decision making.
He is the record winner of the Kantar Information is Beautiful awards and his work has been exhibited at Venice Biennale of Architecture, SIGGRAPH, Max Planck Science Gallery, Fondation EDF, and Ars Electronica.
In the past, Moritz has helped clients like the OECD, Google News Initiative, Salesforce, World Economic Forum, Deutsche Bahn and the Max Planck Research Society to find insights and beauty in large data sets.
As a writer, co-host of the Data Stories (https://data-stori.es) podcast, and sought-after keynote speaker and workshop facilitator, Moritz Stefaner continues to excite more and more people about the magic that can emerge when art and science connect.
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Transcript
00:01.74
Jon
back together again. ah or we finally get to see each other it’s been too long are you friend good to see ah yeah ah german countryside Just kids getting older, more gray hair, just, you know, yeah.
00:09.72
Moritz
It’s been a while indeed. Yeah, great to see you, Adron. I’m doing fine. Still here in my little, like, office here in the countryside in Germany. No much has changed. Yeah, I’m going nowhere.
00:25.17
Moritz
Exactly, exactly. There you are. There you go.
00:27.79
Jon
Even busy, I’ve seen ah i’ve seen a lot of your your lot of your stuff, excited to talk about it. um let’s Let’s talk about, maybe we could talk about this this podcast project you did, because it’s kind of like you can kind of look back and then we can look forward.
00:42.31
Jon
like um
00:43.39
Moritz
True.
00:44.31
Jon
So for folks who don’t know, you and Enrico Bertini for a long time ah hosted the Data Stories Podcast. And ah recently you pulled all the transcripts together and built a little tool with it. So do you want to talk about like, well, first I guess the question is like what inspired, after all this time, like what inspired you to like but finally view that?
01:05.23
Moritz
yeah yeah so Yeah, it’s true. so We started the podcast in 2012 and I was always like, wow, it’s such an archive of of like great conversations and also reflective really of how the field has changed and how our thinking has changed. I got really curious like if we can make that archive more accessible. and And we did play with transcriptions, but back in the day we had them done manually.
01:30.98
Jon
Yeah.
01:31.07
Moritz
So we had to commission them and had to pay for them and then still had to correct them because there’s a lot of like peculiar names and databases and those special concepts like Voronoi maps and so on.
01:41.26
Moritz
So you can’t expect people to know how to spell that, right? And so we sort of gave up on it again, but we were always like, oh, it’s such a pity it because like audio is such a monolithic thing.
01:44.22
Jon
Right.
01:51.22
Moritz
It’s hard to look inside and
01:53.04
Jon
Yeah.
01:53.42
Moritz
cross-read it basically right it’s difficult with audio and text you can search and you can reassemble and count words and whatnot and so um and then um there was this big ai wave and i was like okay cool ai is everywhere what can we do with it and one thing was oh you can transcribe like audio to text now pretty well
01:56.87
Jon
Yeah.
02:02.72
Jon
Great.
02:15.86
Moritz
there’s There’s a bunch of tools you can use. um And we used assembly.ai.
02:18.05
Jon
Yeah.
02:19.90
Moritz
So it’s a special service just for audio transcription. And so yeah, I played with it. And then I was like, oh, this is amazing. And um it does chapters.
02:31.13
Moritz
It does speaker recognition because you also want to know who said what, right?
02:35.87
Jon
Yeah.
02:36.47
Moritz
And it does summarization and whatnot. And yeah.
02:41.31
Jon
So you popped them all in there.
02:43.57
Moritz
Yep.
02:43.81
Jon
Did you have, you had, you had transcripts during the show though, right? Like when you were running the show for a while, you had,
02:49.42
Moritz
Yeah, exactly. So first we had like manual transcripts. And towards the end, we also had automatic transcripts using Whisper, but it wasn’t that systematic.
02:57.15
Jon
right
02:58.15
Moritz
And this is the first time we went through the whole archive, transcribed everything.
03:00.82
Jon
Okay.
03:02.14
Moritz
And now we have a full, full text archive. It’s like 1.5 million words of data stories.
03:07.06
Jon
Wow.
03:07.66
Moritz
You know, it’s like a big heap of
03:10.13
Jon
Right. 1.2 million are in Rico, right? but Yeah.
03:13.69
Moritz
actually not actually not I ran the numbers and I actually talked a bit more yeah so the stereotypes are not are not true so yeah yeah yeah
03:19.85
Jon
but
03:24.65
Jon
Good to know. Good to know. All right. So, and then, so with, so with this now new database, you built like a front end visualization tool.
03:35.45
Moritz
Yeah, right. So um all the transcription, by the way, was done by Miska Knapek. He’s like a database freelancer. So if you have something civil in mind or any like open data project, he’s great.
03:41.67
Jon
e
03:45.52
Moritz
And I know he’s always looking for commissions. So I can recommend working with him. and um Yeah, he helped me with that process and ran all the transcriptions and invested a lot of time in fixing the last 5% which are exactly that arcane, you know, and special names and concepts that you want to get right, because it’s a database podcast.
04:00.90
Jon
right.
04:07.17
Moritz
All the domains, specific stuff needs to be right.
04:10.09
Jon
Right.
04:10.17
Moritz
And yeah, lots of manual replacement transcriptions and
04:13.74
Jon
Wow.
04:14.45
Moritz
Yeah, but now we have this big collection of time stamped speaker annotated text, and we can, let’s say you can search for texts, when do we talk about big data or something like this and then jump to all the audio files immediately right or the audio snippet actually where it was mentioned, and
04:26.71
Jon
Mm hmm. Great.
04:31.76
Moritz
You can also do like a trend analysis, see like when AI or maps or you know or crafting or whatever was mentioned most.
04:36.13
Jon
Yeah. Right.
04:40.33
Moritz
So you can really do a bit of archaeology almost on the field.
04:41.06
Jon
Yeah.
04:45.52
Jon
So so when you when you think back on that, you know, basically decade, time span, I mean, a lot of when you look at those trends, a lot of it is built, is it comes out of what’s happening in the field, but also who you and Enrico wanted. And there was other people I remember at one point, right? Like who you could get on the show, who you wanted to talk with. So like reflecting back, how do you sort of see the show and in retrospect?
05:14.11
Moritz
yeah, yeah, I think that was a great opportunity to think a bit about all that and so we started in 2012 and I think back then I Um, everything was much more open field and much more experimental.
05:27.82
Moritz
I think a lot of people like I were just working on, Hey, what a novel ways we can represent data.
05:28.34
Jon
he
05:33.88
Moritz
Can we invent new chart forms or narrative formats, you know, and
05:33.98
Jon
Yeah.
05:41.33
Moritz
Also this connection between research and practice wasn’t that established. So it was kind of unique that I as a designer and and practitioner would talk to a researcher and we would realize, oh, we say the same words, but we don’t mean the same things.
05:49.61
Jon
yeah Although, although I will say, I will say,
05:54.24
Moritz
That’s crazy.
05:54.41
Jon
I will say that that that bridge has still not been built.
05:54.68
Moritz
And yeah, exactly.
05:56.81
Jon
So, you know, we’ve got like a long way to go there.
05:57.94
Moritz
But yeah, but you know, and, and so I think 2012, 13, 14,
05:58.81
Jon
Yeah.
06:05.81
Moritz
When we started, this was very much a golden age of data journalism. And like I think a lot was driven by New York Times, Guardian, Washington Post, you know who did really amazing new narrative formats, applications, really pushed push the field there a lot.
06:10.59
Jon
Yeah.
06:15.95
Jon
yeah
06:23.61
Moritz
And also, again, the the solo practitioners or the small studios who who built really good like new ways to look at data.
06:28.49
Jon
Yeah. Right.
06:31.48
Moritz
And then maybe 2015, 16, 17 is maybe more the age of back to analog and crafted data. I think dear data came out 2015-ish or so.
06:39.52
Jon
Yeah.
06:42.12
Jon
Yeah. Sounds about right.
06:42.59
Moritz
And I think that was a big wave of
06:43.28
Jon
Yeah.
06:46.47
Moritz
going analog away from the screen um crafting and and haptic and texture and um also more between the lines and you know playing with with the rhetorics and all the associations and maybe a bit of an art push also back at that time i did the data cuisine project a lot like where we would cook data representations or prepare data dishes you know and really stretch the field or the envelope but um
06:49.06
Jon
Yeah.
06:52.50
Jon
Yeah. Yeah. Right.
07:06.95
Jon
Right. Yeah. Yeah.
07:17.51
Moritz
And then maybe 17, 18, 19 is maybe then sort of the pendulum swings back again. People were more looking at functional aspects.
07:23.57
Jon
Mm-hmm.
07:27.96
Moritz
Does this actually work? You know, can we scale it?
07:29.90
Jon
Right. Yes.
07:31.89
Moritz
How, what’s the ROI? You know, I think things became a bit more utilitarian maybe in these years.
07:35.81
Jon
yeah
07:40.06
Jon
Yeah.
07:42.50
Moritz
um And also, DataVis itself got a bit more critical of itself. like I recall there were a lot of like discussions around, is big data analysis a good idea in general?
07:47.98
Jon
yeah
07:53.36
Moritz
you know ah Or what are the limits of what you can do with crunching numbers? And also, what are the limits of fact-based communication?
07:59.82
Jon
Yeah.
08:04.78
Moritz
know Maybe we’re not getting through, regardless how beautiful we make the charts.
08:05.32
Jon
e Yeah, right.
08:10.75
Moritz
maybe there’s still a big gap, you know, and you’re never really able to persuade people who don’t want to be persuaded and so on. And I think that was a big, like maybe first soul searching phase in a sense.
08:17.53
Jon
Yeah.
08:23.17
Moritz
ah
08:23.88
Jon
Well, I think the same thing, not that I’m in this area, but I think the similar thing happened on the academic side too, where it was like, do we really know what we think we know?
08:28.99
Moritz
oh Yeah.
08:33.69
Jon
Like I think of like a Robert Casara’s papers.
08:33.94
Moritz
Oh yeah, like replication crisis, also in psychology, and like asking a lot of questions suddenly.
08:37.16
Jon
Yeah. Right. And like, right, right.
08:41.04
Moritz
Yeah, yeah exactly.
08:41.94
Jon
Like, how do we read a pie chart? Like we don’t, nobody knows. like We all think they’re terrible, but nobody knows.
08:46.69
Moritz
Yeah, yeah, so yeah.
08:48.34
Jon
Yeah.
08:49.56
Moritz
So I think we lost a bit naivety, but also, I mean, that’s the only way to really make progress, right?
08:54.49
Jon
Well, yeah.
08:55.10
Moritz
Yeah.
08:55.76
Jon
I mean, it’s interesting over that time span too. It was like at the beginning, the 2012, that first era was like, everything was interactive and you could click and hover and everything.
09:05.76
Moritz
Hmm.
09:05.80
Jon
And then by the end of that period, it was like, we don’t need to make every bar chart like clickable. Like let’s just make a graph and just, yeah.
09:13.48
Moritz
yeah Yeah, yeah, yeah.
09:16.18
Jon
um
09:17.19
Moritz
Yeah, also more devices, more multi channel, you know, and then people realize, oh, a little square image is actually something that works everywhere, you know, and, and, ah or a movie, you know, a video clip, like 30 seconds, people just do it in the subway and so on.
09:20.13
Jon
Yeah.
09:26.26
Jon
who ready Yeah.
09:29.95
Jon
Yeah.
09:32.84
Moritz
So and I think that that all really Yeah, came to full effect like, yeah, around these years, probably. And also, I sort of moved away from more, let’s say, experimental and communication focused projects, more towards tools and like long term projects, building systems and
09:38.73
Jon
Right.
09:51.36
Moritz
like maybe going from artisan more to architect, you know, to some to some degree.
09:55.01
Jon
Yeah. yeah
09:58.28
Moritz
Also because I thought like, huh, I mean, it’s kind of nice that you can always come up with new engaging visuals, but is that all that’s there is to it, right?
10:08.00
Jon
Right.
10:08.45
Moritz
Or how do we create lasting impact or give people actually something they can work with and, and you know, do something better actually.
10:13.85
Jon
Yeah. Well, I still, I still remember maybe this was towards the end of the period. You did, um, you did a piece for Scientific American on the, on the bees, right? And it was like oh this honeycomb graphic, this static piece.
10:25.31
Moritz
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
10:28.79
Jon
And I feel like I haven’t seen that sort of stuff from you as often over the past four or five years, I guess.
10:37.06
Moritz
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah.
10:39.61
Jon
Oh, so what was, I guess, I guess what was your transition in your work and what did you transition kind of from that sort of bespoke work?
10:51.05
Moritz
Hmm.
10:51.43
Jon
and now
10:54.77
Moritz
Yeah, it’s a good question, but I think like what I sort of felt maybe I played through to some degree is doing these like single one off communication pieces.
11:05.39
Moritz
And then I started to think more about how do you create systems or how do you enable other people also to create good graphics, right?
11:15.57
Moritz
Or how do you establish a certain culture or a certain language?
11:16.04
Jon
Yeah.
11:19.46
Moritz
um Basically moving from the particular one thing that you craft really well want to level up and think about, OK, what’s a class of things you know that are crafted well now?
11:28.62
Jon
Yeah.
11:29.91
Moritz
And in a way, it’s it’s a trap also, because once you move that level up, you also lose a lot of control. And a lot of the quality comes from like taking every single thing super serious and thinking about it.
11:37.68
Jon
Yeah. Yeah.
11:43.68
Moritz
and and like So i sort of yeah I want to go back to the crafting part as well. um On the other hand, I think while it’s, yeah, if we really want to have effect at scale and and like lasting effect, maybe you also need to think about these these larger systems that things are embedded in or yeah, where where things happen.
12:02.88
Jon
Yeah, I mean, if you think about large organizations and they’re just trying to get, right, they’re just trying to build their own internal, even just their internal metrics, their own internal KPIs, like they just need to get stuff done and out the door.
12:05.78
Moritz
Yep.
12:11.76
Moritz
Yep.
12:14.33
Jon
so
12:14.58
Moritz
Yep.
12:15.61
Jon
So you’ve done a bunch of like big projects. You did a thing ah with the World Health Organization on like a design language.
12:25.85
Jon
And you did, a most recently, like this climate conflict index thing.
12:26.58
Moritz
Yep.
12:30.77
Jon
um You want to talk about those projects and like what it was what what it was like sort of building like at scale rather than like a single bespoke project?
12:41.22
Moritz
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
12:42.73
Jon
Yeah.
12:42.85
Moritz
Yeah, I think the transition piece there was first that COVID dashboard. So I built together with Studio NAND, the official German like COVID vaccination dashboard. And that was really exciting like to be able to do that.
12:54.58
Moritz
and It was like a one-off piece because we had to build it really quick, you know, because suddenly it was like, oh, we’re vaccinating now, we’re collecting the numbers, we need to show them and we need to go online in like three weeks.
13:02.62
Jon
right Right.
13:07.18
Moritz
um But then we also thought about, okay, how can we um address everybody in Germany, make sure everybody in Germany understands it, you know, that it’s available in all languages, that’s fully accessible, it’s easily shareable.
13:21.00
Jon
Right.
13:21.97
Moritz
It’s presented in a way that’s like redundant, like maybe some people prefer text, other people prefer graphics, other people prefer a metaphor, like we had a vaccination clock that would show you how many people are vaccinated per second.
13:35.24
Moritz
Other people want to have the full detailed statistics, otherwise they don’t believe you. you know It was also this time of lots of skepticism and discussions.
13:40.03
Jon
Yeah. Right.
13:43.50
Moritz
And so we were thinking really hard and discussing a lot about, okay, how do we make this as simple and accessible as possible, right? And so really super solid, straightforward stuff. And through a few um detours, this led actually to that WHO data design language project, because at the same time, the World Health Organization was rethinking
14:01.05
Jon
Mm hmm.
14:07.04
Moritz
in a smaller team, okay, how do we actually communicate and store and share data, right? um Because they also realized, oh, man, it’s everybody wants real time information now on public health, you know, and that there just wasn’t the case before it, right?
14:12.08
Jon
Yeah.
14:17.61
Jon
ah Yeah.
14:19.66
Moritz
And so they had to rethink that process is quite a bit and
14:19.80
Jon
Right.
14:23.76
Moritz
um Core is an agency in the UK and they brought me on board. And I was able to also then put together a team of freelancers and an agency, Nine Elements in Germany, and a lot of ex external consultants like John, like you.
14:38.80
Moritz
And and so ah you helped a lot on the design system part, for instance.
14:39.27
Jon
yeah
14:42.52
Moritz
And so we were able to really get input from from great experts.
14:42.87
Jon
Yeah.
14:46.13
Moritz
and really rethink from the ground up, okay, how should data communication look like, you know, in 2020 something um for an organization like this.
14:55.16
Jon
Yeah.
14:56.38
Moritz
And so we put a lot of emphasis on really like simple building blocks.
14:57.09
Jon
Right.
15:02.25
Moritz
um uh, transparency, wide accessibility, um, like really like a Lego system, you know, super solid and everything snaps into place.
15:10.60
Jon
Yeah.
15:12.90
Moritz
And, and that’s really robust and, and, and can withstand in a lot of like, you know, context and situations.
15:13.41
Jon
Yeah.
15:20.60
Jon
Does that, ah for for someone who spent their career like building these super bespoke different kinds of projects, right?
15:20.82
Moritz
and
15:28.89
Moritz
Yeah.
15:29.16
Jon
Does that, ah does that sort of like Lego design process, does that like hurt your heart a little bit? Or do you just feel like most people like just need to, like they’re they’re not building honeycomb plots, right?
15:41.51
Moritz
Yeah.
15:47.09
Jon
like they’re just they’re they’re They’re doing research or doing data analysis and they need to get this information out to a public and and and that’s okay.
15:47.59
Moritz
Yeah.
15:53.52
Moritz
Yeah.
15:55.03
Jon
But but does it like hurt you a little bit on the inside?
15:57.86
Moritz
No, it didn’t hurt, because we said, this is the way to go. you know and And this is was, you know we we knew this is the way to go, and this is how we want to do it.
16:01.21
Jon
Yeah.
16:05.74
Moritz
um But you’re right, in the sense that the actual practice of building a system like this is very different than building a cool like data graphic that you just make up.
16:05.81
Jon
Yeah.
16:14.01
Jon
Yeah.
16:14.74
Moritz
right Because you really have to think in systems.
16:15.26
Jon
Yeah.
16:17.14
Moritz
And so we had all this like design tokens that would define all the colors and font sizes. and light mode and dark mode and high contrast mode and so on and you always have to think in abstractions and within that framework of what you have already and so it’s like a big cathedral right it’s you can’t just do something like oh let’s make this orange but you have to think about okay what’s the semantic meaning of this thing and which color like which abstract color type is it right and so will that work and
16:23.96
Jon
Right. Yeah.
16:48.20
Jon
Yeah.
16:51.01
Moritz
I think it’s cognitively very demanding and I have high respect of people who do that well because like you have to concentrate really hard.
16:55.68
Jon
Yeah. Yeah.
16:57.86
Moritz
And the other thing is, um yeah you have to be careful that you build a system that’s so simple, that’s still expressive and not limiting, but always creates new opportunities.
17:09.71
Moritz
And it’s never a rule book that suffocates you, you know?
17:10.34
Jon
yeah
17:13.96
Moritz
And I think that’s the danger with all systems is like they grow, go, grow until they become like heavy.
17:14.47
Jon
yeah
17:20.19
Moritz
and
17:22.83
Moritz
obscure and alone like get an administration basically.
17:26.13
Jon
Right.
17:26.39
Moritz
And so you always have to think, it’s like gardening.
17:26.72
Jon
Yeah.
17:28.43
Moritz
You always have to think about, okay, which part can we prune again? Or ah what what what could we now combine or name better? So it’s a constant gardening activity. and But I think the most humbling part was that we realized, so we’ve been all had an expert team, great people, all really um seasoned database designers.
17:49.68
Moritz
But we had endless discussions how a line chart actually works. I don’t know. For instance, you have years, right? like You have five years in the line chart.
17:57.30
Jon
Yeah.
17:59.96
Moritz
So yeah you make five sections on the horizontal axis. right But now does the line start in the middle of that first section or at the beginning?
18:03.62
Jon
e
18:07.03
Jon
Right? Yeah. rain at that you Right Right?
18:09.58
Moritz
Or at the end? But either way you do it, you run into trouble and you’re like, this can’t be true. like but Let’s see how how proper software does it.
18:16.34
Jon
Yes.
18:17.79
Moritz
And then you’re like, oh, they all do it slightly different. it’s you know and you know And then you
18:20.33
Jon
Yeah. Yeah. And they all give you options to change it. Yeah.
18:23.37
Moritz
Exactly. And then you’re like, wow, I had no idea. like it really It’s humbling in a sense that you really think about the the fundamentals of you know of how charts work.
18:31.56
Jon
Yeah. Yeah.
18:32.40
Moritz
and so
18:32.88
Jon
Yeah.
18:33.33
Moritz
ah
18:34.94
Jon
How did you how did you on this?
18:35.02
Moritz
and
18:36.46
Jon
I love this. I love this metaphor of the of the gardening. How did you leave them? um Kind of empowered to or with a plan, I guess, to do that gardening over time.
18:48.83
Moritz
Yeah, so I think I was just watching out for that, like in a sense that I took that role, sort of pruning, pruning also, um and just building the simplest stuff that’s absolutely needed.
18:55.71
Jon
Yeah. Yeah.
19:02.31
Moritz
Like, so so there’s this Yackney principle, you ain’t gonna need it. Like, you know, like if you come up with something, probably you’re not gonna need it. So, you know, really, unless something’s absolutely needed needed, you just don’t build it.
19:10.33
Jon
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
19:14.90
Moritz
And so we just had six truck types in the beginning or something. and
19:17.66
Jon
ehi
19:18.23
Moritz
And it was vehemently defending those because they were like, but we need stacked bars and we need a scatter block.
19:22.60
Jon
Yeah.
19:23.82
Moritz
You can also do two line charts next to each other and then coordinate them.
19:24.10
Jon
Yeah. Yeah.
19:27.86
Moritz
Or, you know, it’s like always looking for easy ways how things can be solved within that simple framework.
19:28.33
Jon
Yeah.
19:34.83
Jon
Yes.
19:35.52
Moritz
And the last part was really building everything out with code so that We had a system where if we were to change a tone of blue in Figma, we were able to save and export and then rebuild, and it would change everywhere.
19:52.52
Moritz
So so there is no cost to adjusting things.
19:52.89
Jon
e Right.
19:57.72
Moritz
Afterwards. So we we, yeah.
19:58.71
Jon
Yeah.
19:58.97
Moritz
And so we, we build a smart system there, um, that, that would enable that. And that would allow us to really change things as we see the project needs, you know, and, and I think that works well.
20:06.20
Jon
Right.
20:09.83
Jon
Right.
20:12.20
Jon
And you have you kept like, what, what was the adoption part like?
20:12.78
Moritz
Yeah.
20:17.64
Jon
So I can imagine you have this team of people, you’ve got the core folks at WHO, you’ve got your team, and then you sort of like, release this thing out to, I mean, I don’t know how many people work at WHO, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, I don’t know, like, yeah,
20:18.12
Moritz
yeah
20:23.08
Moritz
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
20:31.25
Moritz
yeah Yeah, lots of teams and across the world and so on. So it’s really hard.
20:34.90
Jon
Right.
20:35.49
Moritz
Yeah, exactly.
20:36.03
Jon
So what, so what would, did you, did you get to talk with them about like that piece of it?
20:40.55
Moritz
Yeah, so I’m sort of out of the project by now, so I can’t really say exactly how that goes.
20:43.58
Jon
Yeah. Yeah.
20:45.56
Moritz
But the the strategy around it was to build first a few individual products that are important also to the organization and build them in this small team and then sort of make bigger circles and and either build custom solutions for other teams or have them sort of adopted fully.
21:02.86
Moritz
um Yeah, but this process takes a while because of course there’s content management system and wider considerations and and so on.
21:06.30
Jon
Yeah. Yeah.
21:12.28
Moritz
And so we basically built this core of these are the principles. These are the building blocks. These are really good examples of how it should work. And there’s also the software part of it that’s really clean and and nicely done.
21:20.42
Jon
yeah
21:24.25
Moritz
And yeah, now they have to sort of run with it.
21:24.95
Jon
Right.
21:27.62
Jon
Yeah, it is. It is interesting. I mean, I can’t tell you how many, how many groups I’ve worked with where it’s like, you know, I’ll be teaching something and I’ll say, so do you all have like a style guide or a color palette?
21:38.87
Jon
And you’ll see like one person on this side of them will be nodding and the other person, these people on this side of them like, no, we don’t have anything like that. Cause you could build these systems, but if people don’t know about them, then, you know, they don’t really accomplish the goal.
21:49.63
Moritz
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
21:52.57
Jon
Um,
21:52.77
Moritz
man
21:53.96
Jon
so So that’s a really cool project. But then more recently, I mean i think like really recently, right the you have this climate conflict index project that just came out.
22:03.03
Moritz
Yeah.
22:03.14
Jon
You want to talk a little bit about that one? Because that’s kind of like more core how I think about Moritz’s work out in the in the world.
22:05.16
Moritz
Right. Yeah. So that, yeah.
22:12.70
Moritz
probably in a sense that it has also that system parted, but it has a real content. Like in a sense that, oh, we have a new dataset that is created extra, like specifically specifically for that project.
22:17.94
Jon
Yeah.
22:23.09
Moritz
And now it’s our role to communicate that and demonstrate how it’s used.
22:23.75
Jon
Yeah.
22:27.47
Moritz
So, and I think I enjoy that, that it’s, yeah, there’s a concrete content that we can actually work with.
22:28.33
Jon
Yeah.
22:33.51
Moritz
And so yeah It came out of so the German Foreign Office. um They want to understand better how climate change will overlap with or like hazards from climate change um will overlap with violent conflict and other like pressures on on a region. right so you know Today, like different regions of the world get these types of stress from all kinds of different factors. and um yeah we believe like
23:04.19
Moritz
unforeseen climate disasters can, for instance, like cause migration, which causes then you know conflicts other elsewhere.
23:08.24
Jon
Right.
23:09.97
Moritz
and And they have that yeah on the on the radar. Basically, I want to know what what to do about it.
23:14.18
Jon
Yeah. Right.
23:16.08
Moritz
And so um we looked into existing data sources and built like a first quick prototype based on that. But then we realized to make it actually actionable in-house and also for others.
23:27.33
Moritz
It’s an open source project. um there should be like a harmonized set of data layers that you can just put on top of each other and and combine them yourself. And that are all on the same spatial grid, the same time grid.
23:40.65
Moritz
So you can see where will, or where have been floods, where have been heat waves, where have been armed fights, um and also how how well is the region equipped on ah on a political administrative level to respond to to problems, right?
23:46.09
Jon
Yeah.
23:58.03
Jon
Yeah.
23:58.41
Moritz
And yeah, so they um created a whole research project. So we have the PIC, which is the climate or an institute that investigates climate impacts. And we have the University of the Armed Forces, which are obviously the security experts, and they have researchers now working on that. And we work with them, small team of database experts, to put the data to use in-house, but also Explain it to the outside and make it accessible.
24:26.86
Moritz
And so yeah, it has a lot of different facets.
24:28.41
Jon
Yeah.
24:30.05
Moritz
So we need to sort of understand how, how the data side works, how the application side works, do a lot of user centered design. Also, uh, talk to people how they use it.
24:37.13
Jon
So how does that, for you, it sounds like there are a lot of um elements in that that I would guess you probably don’t have like a lot of experience working with like military data and military simulations.
24:39.73
Moritz
Yeah.
24:50.83
Moritz
Yeah.
24:50.99
Jon
So like, okay, so correct me if I’m wrong, when you’re working on a project, um you’re doing at least some basic kind of gut checks on the data, right? Like this makes sense.
25:00.36
Moritz
Great. Yeah.
25:01.95
Jon
This feels right to me. When you’re doing a project like this, where there’s so many different data sources from so many different places where, I mean, no individual could be expected to be able to have a gut check on military, whatever.
25:04.09
Moritz
Hmm.
25:16.12
Jon
um how do you how do you ah How do you think through the data? How do you approach that? Do you do you just trust the team?
25:21.29
Moritz
Hmm.
25:23.29
Jon
like what is What happens for you?
25:27.14
Moritz
Yeah, yeah. So we have a lot this like connecting role between we have the domain experts and the analysts and the policymakers in the office um and desk researchers and whatnot.
25:36.81
Jon
Yeah.
25:39.66
Moritz
And they know what they need, right? And they also know what they usually use and they know what types of formats work in-house.
25:47.37
Jon
Yeah.
25:48.28
Moritz
And So for instance, they know, OK, often it needs to be printable still or like easy to circulate, you know nothing complicated, oh high contrast, static, well annotated.
25:54.96
Jon
Mhm.
26:02.00
Jon
Mhm.
26:02.33
Moritz
um But also what we learned is in-house there is almost like a social media culture in the sense that graphics work really well, maps work really well, and especially annotated graphics and maps, like one slide, basically, that has a clear message.
26:16.19
Moritz
has a few detailed bullets and then annotate annotated spots on on a map or something that’s perfect.
26:21.91
Jon
Right.
26:22.02
Moritz
And so, and I think that’s a lot what people now realize, oh, that works well in the web also works in these work contexts, which I find interesting.
26:27.86
Jon
Yeah. Yeah.
26:29.35
Moritz
And um so we learn about that. And then we have the researchers and they say, oh, this is actually something we can provide data wise, or we have these different alternatives of how to calculate something.
26:42.84
Moritz
um And of course there’s a mismatch between what people say they want and what they actually want.
26:48.89
Jon
here
26:48.98
Moritz
And then there’s also a mismatch between what they actually want and what can be done, right? And so yeah you constantly have to sort of think on your feet and like translate and negotiate a bit between these different layers yeah or forces in the project.
26:53.97
Jon
Yeah, Yeah.
27:03.90
Moritz
And I think that’s that’s a lot of our role, like like this um a sort of node between these two kind of separate roles.
27:11.77
Jon
Yeah. Yeah.
27:12.98
Moritz
And of course, we cannot tell the researchers exactly what to do because they’re researchers and they need to have their freedom also.
27:19.35
Jon
Yeah.
27:19.33
Moritz
um And we respect that. At the same time, they also want it to be effective and to be used. And so yeah, we sort of try to you know just translate between these different parties.
27:31.10
Jon
Yeah, like translate and bridge all the all the different skill sets and the content areas.
27:33.99
Moritz
Yeah. Yeah.
27:38.33
Moritz
Yeah, yeah.
27:38.38
Jon
um
27:39.33
Moritz
And actually, the graphics or like any interactive prototypes we do, they play a huge role there in um just enabling that discussion because you often discuss in theory, oh, it would be great to have a map that shows all the hotspots and blah, blah, blah.
27:54.96
Moritz
And then you see it and then the real discussion starts. Oh, actually, that’s quite seasonal.
27:57.91
Jon
Right.
27:59.64
Moritz
Should we do it yearly or should we do it seasonally, you know?
28:01.82
Jon
Oh, yeah.
28:02.86
Moritz
Or like, Is it actually better to show all the floods? Or shouldn’t we show them only where actually people live? you know There’s huge floods in Siberia, but it’s not a big damage.
28:10.91
Jon
here
28:13.25
Moritz
Yeah, maybe we should. But then in other contexts, you want to see the raw data, right? Or how much do you normalize the data?
28:19.07
Jon
Right.
28:21.26
Moritz
Or do you show raw values that have a unit, you know which are easier to understand?
28:24.50
Jon
Yeah.
28:25.22
Moritz
but then maybe sometimes it’s better to do something more elaborate, but then it’s just the score between zero and one.
28:29.58
Jon
Yeah.
28:32.48
Moritz
and And so, you know, and all this just happens when you build quickly, build data representations and have people play with it.
28:40.12
Jon
Yeah. And do you feel like those deliberations always end up in a better final product or or have, or have you found in some cases that like you have these deliberations and you end up on this curve where you have to like pull people, pull people back?
28:58.29
Moritz
Yeah,
28:58.38
Jon
cause Because, because in like my experience of working, especially with like researchers and scientists, right? It is, um, I guess it’s even when you’re saying you know we’re building this for a broader public, it’s easy for people to lean back into what they’re comfortable with.
29:15.96
Jon
Like, let’s use all of our jargon. let’s This is what I’m interested in. But it’s not going to be great for the general public. But like do you find that that bend in people’s desires and you have to kind of rein them back in?
29:23.01
Moritz
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
29:30.37
Moritz
um Yeah, it can go all kinds of ways, of course. so yeah Sometimes you have this faster horses thing, so I want exactly what I’m doing now, but somebody else should do it for me, or it’s already done.
29:41.22
Moritz
you know But then people don’t even question if what they do is fundamentally the right thing.
29:41.81
Jon
Yeah, yeah.
29:46.53
Moritz
right And then it’s hard to convince them otherwise if you can’t demonstrate a complete solution you know that that replaces that. And so, of course, there’s some inertia there.
29:55.67
Jon
Yeah.
29:58.25
Moritz
um and Or, as you say, you can just, like rabbit like in a group, you can dig the deepest rabbit holes, of course, if if you’re not careful.
30:07.26
Jon
Yeah, yeah.
30:09.55
Moritz
and But I think, to some degree, yeah, you just need good like project management and, I think, design leadership in a way. like that So my theory is if a project is driven, I might be biased because I’m a designer, but if you have a strong like design leadership in a project, it it doesn’t really happen because then there is a clear vision of which phase you’re in and which type of input you’re looking for.
30:24.60
Jon
Yeah.
30:28.42
Jon
Yeah.
30:31.89
Moritz
And if you’re expanding possibilities currently, right, or if you’re narrowing down and that’s something you would just And now it’s also like, oh, first we, you know, really go blue sky, you know, open field and and what could we do?
30:46.82
Moritz
And then you say, well, now we need to get realistic and pick one of those solutions, actually build it out and test it and not keep changing things.
30:47.55
Jon
Right. Yeah.
30:53.70
Moritz
And I think, yeah, if this is well prepared and and clearly communicated, then it can work. But it it takes a bit of time, and um it’s not always the same in every group.
31:07.49
Moritz
But yeah, I think that this is where design practice can can really bring a lot of value.
31:07.54
Jon
Yeah.
31:12.45
Moritz
And I can e immediately spot a project where there is no design leadership, because it can have exactly these problems. It’s just endless like discussions or endless bug fixing, but no actual like new improvements or all these things.
31:20.09
Jon
Yeah.
31:27.69
Moritz
so yeah
31:28.81
Jon
Yeah, yeah no so so it’s funny so if if you were um if you are sitting right now in front of a room of you know students about to come out into the world with their, so they want to be data visualization,
31:29.10
Moritz
When I want hear yeah representing design.
31:47.34
Jon
specialists, I don’t know, data visualizers, whatever the whatever the term is, right?
31:50.38
Moritz
Yeah. Yeah.
31:51.30
Jon
What would you recommend a skill or skills they develop aside from you know the technical part of you know being, let’s just say, a good designer or a good developer?
32:05.04
Jon
And what I’m thinking here is like,
32:06.30
Moritz
Yeah.
32:07.19
Jon
the person to person skills that you just mentioned, like, you know, would you say like, project management skill, like interpersonal skills, like, you know, writing skills, like, what would be the skills that you would say, like, this is what you really like, to do the job, you’ve already got the design thing handled, but like to do the actual job, like, what would those other skills be that you would use you think people should have?
32:26.90
Moritz
yeah
32:31.97
Moritz
That’s a great question. So I think the communication part is huge and and people tend to underestimate that yeah that.
32:35.89
Jon
Yeah.
32:38.92
Moritz
And it’s never as easy as you just do the work and then the work speaks for itself.
32:38.95
Jon
Yeah.
32:43.72
Moritz
you know And often you dream of that.
32:44.44
Jon
Right. Right. Yeah.
32:46.46
Moritz
It’s like, oh, couldn’t I just do the the work? And then people say, oh, it’s great.
32:49.27
Jon
Yeah.
32:50.72
Moritz
and
32:50.79
Jon
Yeah.
32:51.66
Moritz
but then and But if it were like that, you would also miss so much interesting you know discussions and learnings and and you know like advances you can get from like and first being irritated and then understanding somebody’s position or how people can totally see the same thing totally differently.
33:01.60
Jon
Yeah.
33:08.54
Moritz
um Yeah, I think that’s a big part.
33:09.09
Jon
Yeah.
33:11.11
Moritz
so I think generally it’s good if If you have some environment where you can quickly produce a lot of different visual data representation, so it can be sketching, it can be code.
33:24.60
Moritz
um I’m having so much fun right now with observable plot and observable framework.
33:30.75
Jon
Yeah.
33:31.15
Moritz
I think um like Mike and Phil, Philippe Riviere, Mike Bostock, they’re doing amazing work on the product.
33:31.48
Jon
Yeah.
33:38.35
Moritz
And for us, it has been really a game changer in terms of sketching with data real quick. So big shout out here.
33:43.46
Jon
Mm.
33:45.21
Moritz
um But it can be anything. you know so It just needs to be one environment where you can quickly load data that’s reasonably like large and get a lot of different perspectives on it.
33:55.61
Moritz
Or if you have an idea, quickly be able to demonstrate it.
33:59.68
Jon
Mm hmm.
34:00.14
Moritz
Because working with these concrete artifacts, That’s the game changer. And that’s the real quality we can bring, because this is often what people who are not data visualizers who are more technical or more conceptual.
34:13.11
Moritz
They don’t have these artifacts, right? And so conversation stops at some point, and you’re like, yeah, but then we’ll have to see.
34:15.14
Jon
Yeah.
34:19.02
Moritz
Or we just decide for one of the options, but we don’t actually know how they will play out. And I think we have that gift, basically, that we can make these things all concrete. and and spur new conversations and I think so being able to create these artifacts is the one thing but then also framing them presenting them in the right way thinking about how to present ideas how to elicit the right type of feedback at the right point in time I know John you’ve done a lot on on presentations as well right so it’s a lot also this
34:50.47
Jon
here Yeah.
34:52.39
Moritz
storytelling skill, you know, that about what’s the story of our project and where are we in that story, right? And and sort of, um but also not prescribing that but also shaping that together and and being open there.
34:59.21
Jon
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
35:06.84
Moritz
um I think that’s sort of key.
35:07.62
Jon
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, I want to, I want to finish up, um, uh, you mentioned, uh, a blue sky earlier and I wanted to, uh, ask you what I asked Enrico a few weeks ago.
35:20.37
Jon
Where, where’s your, uh, date of his social media world at these days?
35:25.19
Moritz
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I used to be super active on Twitter, but, you know, yeah, that has changed.
35:28.54
Jon
Yeah, but it’s, yeah, that’s bad. Yeah.
35:30.89
Moritz
So that has changed. And so I was like, oh yeah, I tried Mastodon for a while, but I am now pretty optimistic with Blue Sky.
35:35.69
Jon
Yeah.
35:38.11
Moritz
It’s kind of fun at the moment, at least.
35:40.67
Jon
Yeah.
35:41.03
Moritz
And I also enjoy Instagram. So um it’s more visual and generally a pretty positive vibe.
35:44.91
Jon
Yeah.
35:49.81
Moritz
You know, yeah you wouldn’t discuss big things on on Instagram, but it’s good, good entertainment.
35:53.19
Jon
No, right.
35:54.29
Moritz
Yeah.
35:55.02
Jon
Yeah.
35:55.22
Moritz
You see what everybody’s up to.
35:57.41
Jon
yeah
35:57.76
Moritz
Yeah, but I feel, yeah, the online community is for me a bit more obscure now. I don’t even know where everybody is.
36:05.87
Jon
Yeah.
36:05.88
Moritz
So I thought I’m not part of the the cool circles anymore.
36:06.71
Jon
Yeah.
36:09.55
Jon
The cool kids, yeah.
36:10.59
Moritz
Yeah, I don’t know.
36:11.02
Jon
We’re the old we’re the old guys now, yeah.
36:11.78
Moritz
but Where is everybody? Where is everybody? So yeah, it it has shrunk a bit. I think my my world in that respect. But on the other hand, then you maybe concentrate more on your work, you know, the more close knit circle.
36:22.82
Jon
Right. So I was going to ask, like, do you?
36:25.28
Moritz
Yeah.
36:25.45
Jon
Yeah, I was going to ask, like, do I go back and forth on this because I missed some of the discussions and the closeness and and that, but also, like, I don’t i’ve I’ve deleted all the apps off my phone.
36:37.06
Jon
Like, I don’t. And so there’s freedom to, like. read and like do other things, right? Like, um, so, so how do you feel it?
36:48.17
Jon
Like, I just wonder how you feel about that. Like the community is more dispersed now, but you know, I mean, it’s clearly okay.
36:51.19
Moritz
Yeah, yeah yeah
36:55.12
Jon
Like the world is what the world is, but, um, Yeah.
36:58.59
Moritz
yeah Yeah, I think that there’s more happening offline, more happening on other channels. It’s kind of nice. Also good formats. I enjoy a lot of newsletters. you know like It’s a good format.
37:09.32
Jon
Yeah.
37:11.21
Moritz
And it’s also less fragmented. It’s more like a traditional, almost like a magazine or newspaper type thing.
37:20.31
Jon
Yeah.
37:20.77
Moritz
you know It’s a big thing with little parts and not a lot of chunks flying around.
37:22.77
Jon
Right. Yeah.
37:24.61
Moritz
So I think that actually helps with the concentration, the depth.
37:28.02
Jon
Yeah.
37:29.00
Moritz
um But I sort of miss this sort of marketplace thing, bazaar thing, you know, where you just go in and see what’s happening. It’s like, oh, these two are fighting and what’s happening over there, you know?
37:37.57
Jon
Yeah. Yeah.
37:41.87
Moritz
And like, dude, to have this feeling of there’s a community you can always dip into. And I think data with society, is it to some degree the Slack channel there?
37:47.52
Jon
yeah
37:52.30
Moritz
But it’s also just a very specific, like, you know, wedge of the whole field that that’s sort of present there.
37:54.63
Jon
Yeah. Yeah.
37:58.61
Moritz
And also we need more conferences.
38:00.88
Jon
Yeah.
38:02.46
Moritz
So I think a lot of the the really, really good database conferences went away because they’ve been around for a long time.
38:09.44
Jon
yeah
38:10.47
Moritz
There was COVID and so on. I think all totally understandable, but I think we need a few good replacements now. um Yeah.
38:16.03
Jon
Yeah, yeah. I’ve been missing the missing the conference circuit. It feels like it’s down to kind of like outlier from data vis society and some of the academic conferences, which are a very different vibe altogether.
38:24.25
Moritz
yeah
38:28.73
Moritz
yep Yeah, yeah there’s there’s a few here and there, but I’m i’m also sort of missing out that thing.
38:28.91
Jon
But um but to yeah.
38:37.36
Moritz
And it’s gonna be interesting to see how it how it develops. Like if the database community, you know, we’ll find back together into one thing, or maybe if we really split up in different subgroups and then maybe again more adjacent to the, because we are sort of squeezed into other,
38:48.23
Jon
Right.
38:53.75
Moritz
into the middle of, you know, other fields, maybe then everybody goes to their other field that they are maybe most at home with, you know.
38:55.29
Jon
Yeah. In the middle of a lot of fields.
38:59.72
Jon
Right. Yeah.
39:02.01
Moritz
But I think that would be kind of sad. I think DataVis is unique and also I gave a few talks about what I think is a unique DataVis mindset. Maybe we could link one of them because they if I think there is something that unifies us all in terms of
39:11.64
Jon
Yeah.
39:16.58
Moritz
how we look at data and what extra value we can bring. And I think we should like foster that and like um ah stand our ground there.
39:24.46
Jon
Yeah. Well, I mean, just like people have have have have one foot in the date of his date of his world and another foot in their economics or design or anthropology or astronomy world, like you know you can still kind of do both of those.
39:26.69
Moritz
Yeah.
39:37.59
Moritz
Yeah.
39:40.47
Jon
so But yeah.
39:40.81
Moritz
Yeah, yeah, but I think we should have or make sure we have like a good, vibrant database community that meets up regularly and you know, where lots of interesting things happen.
39:48.22
Jon
Yeah. I mean, you just need Moritzconf just like out on the farm there.
39:52.75
Moritz
TEDx my house. Yeah.
39:54.44
Jon
I love it.
39:56.87
Moritz
Yeah. I mean, yeah maybe camping, if if camping is an option, then I could offer that.
39:58.58
Jon
Backpacks for everybody. Oh, yeah. Yeah.
40:06.15
Moritz
It would be fun.
40:07.40
Jon
Um, well, always good to see you. It’s been a long time. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Um, I’ll share this, uh, these projects with folks and hopefully they’ll check them out and they should definitely check out the data stories podcast transcript.
40:18.72
Jon
Uh, cause that was a lot of fun to like dig in and and go back.
40:20.94
Moritz
Yeah, and search for your favorite words and maybe rediscover some old episodes.
40:25.92
Jon
That’s right. That’s right. Thanks.
40:26.97
Moritz
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
40:27.04
Jon
bar I appreciate it.
40:28.67
Moritz
Thank you, John. Bye bye.
