Born in 2009, Soak&#39;s childhood home was St Francis House - a former Primitive Methodist chapel built in the 1800s. 

We knew it as converted office space, and there, Soak&#39;s early years took shape.

Once the teenage years hit, Soak moved homes twice - travelling from Bank Plain, the former &#39;Banking Circle&#39; of the city, to Millenium Plain, overlooking the famous Millenium Library at the Forum.

Now into its adulthood, Soak has found a comfortable home within the historic area of Colegate - a bustling collection of streets, lanes, and alleyways which have been settled since Saxon times.

Soak sits now in a Georgian building with high ceilings, delicate wainscotting, and windows that require someone over 6 feet tall to open them. The laptops are whirring, and the creative flow is flowing.

Nestled within the Creative Quarter of the city, our neighbours feature bars, cafes, pubs, crypts, and cloisters - a sprinkling of old and new for the next stage in Soak&#39;s journey.

We&#39;re happy to announce our new home to you all!

Soak Digital has explored many corners of the fine city that is Norwich.

IMG_9037.jpg

We've Moved!

Here are our thoughts on how things might evolve.

<h3>Artificial Intelligence</h3>

AI will profoundly impact many industries. We believe that if leveraged ethically and responsibly, it has the potential to streamline some of the more labour-intensive aspects of data visualisation. If AI could be utilised to efficiently generate bespoke visualisations tailored to specific business needs, or individual user preferences - this allows more time for analysis of the data, and more time for deeper consideration of the insights.

<h3>Immersive visualisations</h3>

With Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR), we see a potential to bring data visualisation into immersive 3D spaces, allowing users to navigate and explore data in multi-dimensional environments. This has great possibilities for accessibility of data, as well as profound implications in fields such as medicine, climate science, and urban planning.

<h3>Hyper-personalisation</h3>

As the world fills with more and more personalised data, we would like to see dashboards and data tools adapting to individual user behaviours in real time. This shift would turn static, one-size-fits-all dashboards into fluid, user-specific BI tools that are both powerful and easy to use.

<h3>Natural Language interfaces</h3>

Integrating natural language processing (NLP) into data visualisations would allow users to interact with data on a more human level. Instead of manually adjusting filters or constructing queries, users will be able to ask questions like &quot;what&#39;s driving this quarter&#39;s revenue growth?&quot; and receive intuitive visual representations of the answer. This will help to democratise data access, making it easier for a broader range of users to interact with complex datasets.

<h3>Ethical and transparent visualisation</h3>

As data becomes increasingly central to decision-making, the ethics of data and data visualisation should also be paramount. We imagine a future where specific transparency features allow users to track the origins, assumptions, and biases behind the data. Visualisations will need to evolve to ensure ethical representation, allowing users to understand the process of data collection, and ensuring that visual decisions (like scales or colour schemes) do not mislead or manipulate.

<h3>Collaborative and social visualisations</h3>

We want to see visualisations become more collaborative, allowing teams to interact with the same data set in real time. Visualisations should also become more social, with features allowing users to share insights, comments on specific data points, and integrate findings directly into their workflows.

<h3>Sustainability and minimalism in visualisation</h3>

At Soak, we already place a high value on sustainability and minimalism in data visualisation - and we predict that this will become the norm, with the industry embracing a change towards clarity, simplicity, and eco-efficiency. As the cognitive load of information increases, there will be a demand for visualisations that strip away unnecessary complexity, focusing on delivering the core message as succinctly as possible.

Data already has a profound impact on our businesses, organisations, and our everyday lives. As we move into the next decade, we hope that data will become more accessible and immersive, and you won&#39;t need to have a phD in mathematics to understand it.

Over the next decade, data visualisation is poised to undergo transformative changes, driven by advances in artificial intelligence, augmented reality, interactivity, and personalised insights.

joshua-sortino-LqKhnDzSF-8-unsplash (1).jpg

Decoding the next decade - Visualising the near future of data

The exercise was to conceive ways of elevating specific ‘behaviour change over time’ visualisations to be more informative and engaging.

After evaluating a range of sample data sets, we conceptualised our approach using several charting styles and variations that we refined with regular input from the Ezra Team.

The result is a suite of static and interactive charts that are impactful, accessible and versatile for use across multiple touchpoints.

EZRA, a revolutionary global virtual coaching and learning provider, engaged Soak to provide a short-term data visualisation consultancy to evolve some elements of their brilliant customer insights portal.

EZRA_listing_3a4d5baa27.jpg

Visualising behaviour change

Royal Society

World Wide Fund for Nature

Totaljobs

The World Bank

The London School of Economics and Political Science

The Economist

The Adecco Group

Swiss Re

Queen Mary University of London

HSBC

Harvard University

GoStudent

Games Workshop

AmDocs

Selected work

The interactive tool was seamlessly integrated into GoStudent&#39;s existing website infrastructure and needed to consider several crucial requirements from a UX and technology perspective, including the approach for multiple languages.

The tool carries a considerable volume of data that powers all the indices, country profiles, survey results and analysis. A wide variety of data views meant developing a data structure that ensured optimal speed and accessibility for the end-user. An innovative client-side rendering mechanism was used to achieve a fast and efficient experience.

GoStudent, the #1 rated global tutoring school, conducted a survey spanning seven countries that gained deep insight into education trends from both parent and student perspectives.

Our brief was to work with the static survey data, indices data, and a written report to create an engaging, intuitive, informative, and easy-to-understand interactive experience delivered in an ambitious timescale.

Selected Work - GoStudent

European education survey

Central to our design is an interactive landscape that familiarises users with the interconnected facets of industrial decarbonization. This includes areas like green energy generation, manufacturing industries, the national grid, ports, transportation, and the environment.

The tool features three interactive pathways tailored to different audience needs. These include a public engagement tool to build understanding of the net zero pathways and the impact of decarbonisation, a learning tool to guide school leavers toward potential training routes for a career in decarbonisation and for policy-makers to view relevant research findings.

IDRIC

In collaboration with IDRIC (the Industrial Decarbonisation Research and Innovation Centre), we designed and developed an immersive visualisation tool that allows users to explore what a green industrial future looks like.

IDRIC Listing image.png

Visualising industrial decarbonisation

The data index and campaign featured in several global publications, including the New York Times and underpins a key report that kicks off Swiss Re&#39;s Climate Resilience Campaign for 2021, leading to the COP26 UN climate change conference later this year.

Shortly after being appointed Swiss Re&#39;s global data design partner, the team asked us to design and develop a new, data-driven experience and a suite of campaign assets that helped raise awareness of the global economic impact of climate change.

Selected Work - Swiss Re

The economics of climate change

The fluid, scrolly-telling experience guides users through a series of visually-driven narratives that surface key findings using data visualisation underpinned by case studies focussing on practical, real-world situations.

We’ve been working closely with TotalJobs to bring their latest Social Mobility research study to life. Partnering with The Social Mobility Foundation, the research delves deep into the challenges and hurdles faced by people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds when applying for jobs in the UK.

The campaign’s primary goal was to help raise awareness and provide practical, data-driven advice to employers and recruiters.

Selected Work - Totaljobs

Data-driven scrollytelling

Gravity-background 2.png

Gravity-background mob.png

Gravity-foreground 2 - blur.png

Gravity-foreground 2 - mobile.png

We help businesses and organisations unlock the true value of digital and data.

Digital & Data Design Agency

Latest Project - Swiss Re - Background

Latest Project - Swiss Re - Foreground

span

World bank - BG.jpg

World bank - FG.jpg

The world bank

Human capital animation

Swiss RE - BG.jpg

Swiss RE - FG.jpg

Closing the protection gap

iii - BG.jpg

iii - FG.png

Insurance Information Institute

Dynamic economics dashboard

WWF - BG.jpg

WWF - FG.png

Digital toolkit

QMUL - BG.jpg

QMUL - FG.png

Queen mary university london

Research highways

<ol><li>Data strategy</li><li>Data analysis</li><li>Infographics</li><li>Data storytelling</li><li>Dashboards</li><li>Corporate reports</li><li>Interactive Indices / indexes</li><li>Dynamic data tools</li></ol>

<a href="https://soak.co.uk/what-we-do#data-visualisation">Find out more about our data vis services</a>

Data visualisation 

<ol><li>Digital strategy</li><li>Discovery &amp; planning</li><li>UX &amp; prototyping</li><li>Conceptualisation &amp; design</li><li>Branding</li><li>Development &amp; build</li><li>Integration</li><li>Content Management</li></ol>

<a href="https://soak.co.uk/what-we-do#ux-design--development">Find out more about our UX and design services</a>

UX, design & development

<ol><li>Strategy &amp; planning</li><li>Ideation &amp; conceptualisation</li><li>Custom illustration</li><li>Copywriting</li><li>Asset production</li><li>Internal comms</li></ol>

<a href="https://soak.co.uk/what-we-do#campaign--communications">Find out more about our campaign services</a>

Campaign & communications

<ol><li>Conceptualisation</li><li>Illustration</li><li>Storyboarding</li><li>Narrative development</li><li>Animation</li><li>Post-production</li></ol>

<a href="https://soak.co.uk/what-we-do#animation--video">Find out more about our animation services</a>

Animation & video

Our award-winning digital solutions span the simple to the complex. We&#39;re Creative, UX and Data specialists, always user-focused and not restricted by any one single platform or technology.

What we do

The summit was in response to close engagements with governments across Sub-Saharan Africa on the need to highlight the vital role of human capital in economic growth. It was also the first Human Capital Summit at a Heads of States level in Africa. 

Sub-Saharan Africa entered the last decade with significant deficits in human capital (the knowledge, skills, and health that people accumulate over their lives). The region’s average Human Capital Index (HCI) was the lowest across all the world’s regions, with a significant proportion of African countries at the bottom of the HCI.

The animation, ahead of the keynote speaker, was played at the start of the final day and uses a narrative centred around three core themes: Economic Growth, Resilient Systems and Social Cohesion. 

Data visualisation and storytelling are used throughout the sequence to emphasise and clarify important facts and figures that would resonate with the audience of Heads of State, Leaders, and Policymakers. In a first of its kind data-based and policy integrated storytelling, the innovative approach was very well received by online and in-person viewers.

The World Bank asked us to produce a data-driven animation for The Africa Human Capital Heads of State Summit held in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, on the 25th - 26th of July 2023.

World-bank-listing1 (2).png

The financial burden of such events is enormous, but despite this threat, many people and businesses remain uninsured, leaving them vulnerable when a natural catastrophe strikes.

Swiss RE asked us to develop an interactive data tool illustrating the protection gap and losses from various natural disasters across five continents and twelve countries.

The interface centres around a stylised (mapbox) 3D globe. Clicking on regions and countries reveals the protection gap and total economic losses over the last ten years with the option to deep-dive into more in-depth analysis.

The fully integrated tool is a perfect example of how information can be more accessible, understandable and interesting using interactive data visualisation and information design.

Catastrophes such as hurricanes, earthquakes, floods and winter storms have become more intense and frequent, threatening people and economies worldwide.

Digital & Data Design Agency

Selected work

European education survey

The economics of climate change

Visualising industrial decarbonisation

Data-driven scrollytelling

European education survey

Visualising industrial decarbonisation

The economics of climate change

Data-driven scrollytelling

/ Our Clients

/ News and insights

We've Moved!

Decoding the next decade - Visualising the near future of data

Visualising behaviour change

Human capital animation

Closing the protection gap

Dynamic economics dashboard

Digital toolkit

Research highways