Objectivity &amp; Subjectivity in Design, written by Jon Bliss, Soak&#39;s Senior Designer &amp; Animator 

 A lot of times we will use the word &#39;design&#39; to describe the aesthetic of a project - the front-end, the look and feel - the fonts and the frills.

We will also say that &#39;design is subjective&#39; - a seemingly self-evident truth, simply meaning that every individual has their own aesthetic preferences. In effect, the proverbial horse being led to water - whether the horse drinks or not is a matter of taste.

However, I&#39;m not sure this is true.

Firstly (and slightly as an aside), in this industry I think &#39;design&#39; is far more useful as a verb. It is a set of decisions that are made in order to achieve a common goal. So the first issue is that by making &#39;design&#39; mean &#39;only the aesthetics&#39; we do a great disservice to all other decisions made on a project. For example - copy is written with a purpose in mind, as is code. Therefore, both of these are also &#39;design&#39; processes.

Secondly, it implies that the choice of aesthetic for a project is something rooted in personal preference - rather than a conscious choice made in order to achieve a specific goal.

Thirdly, similar to the previous - it implies that the audience&#39;s reaction to an aesthetic is also ultimately up to their personal preferences. But this is what I think is most untrue, and sometimes where we let ourselves down.

What the audience is actually reacting to (and what we should be considering as designers) is whether the aesthetic is suitable for the situation. And - there usually won’t be a reaction at all, unless it’s wildly inappropriate. This still sounds subjective, but my belief is that it’s possible to say that a given aesthetic is or isn’t objectively suitable for a given situation. 

What makes an aesthetic objectively suitable or unsuitable for a given situation is based on a cultural consensus. For example - we know that comic sans is regarded as a ‘childish’ font, and much maligned. So if we imagine a logo for a funeral home written in comic sans - the majority of people will look at it and feel that this is somehow ‘wrong’. We may say that this is still a subjective reaction, because some people may think that it’s brilliant - however the important factor is the reaction of the majority.

This is how a subjective opinion becomes, en masse, an objective truth - the cultural consensus. You probably shouldn’t use comic sans for your funeral home logo.

However - the cultural consensus only exists at a given point in time. This can be observed quite easily in wild changes of fashion, music, art etc. that happen, even within closed systems. Something new will appear, and either gradually or bombastically, the cultural consensus will shift.

But, logically - if there is an objectively correct way to present something at a given point in time, then where do these shifts even come from, and why do we tolerate them?
I think the answer to this is simply that we’re not creatures of logic.

Several years ago, I was on a website project which had the lofty goal of creating ‘the objective best’ website theme. The theory was thus: by using data to analyse the way people interacted with websites (eye tracking, mouse tracking, ideal length of copy and so on), it would be possible to build pages that were ‘perfectly’ optimised towards getting users to convert. This theory then extended into things like the branding, wherein only certain colour combinations that gave optimal contrast ratios would be permitted on the website.

It was researched, it was planned, and it was built according to those principles. It was, in short, objectively ideal in every way.

The problem was, nobody wanted it.

The end product looked like a website, felt like a website, and was - by all measurable metrics of success - perfectly optimised. But people just didn’t like it.

There was something missing - which, when pressed, people could only describe as a ‘human’ element.

So this is where we run into a snag. We want to say that something can be objectively correct - but here, something objectively correct is being rejected by the majority - making it objectively wrong.

And we’re also finding that the thing that would fix it - the addition of a ‘human’ element that makes it feel ‘right’ - would amount to an arbitrary change that is, by definition, the objectively wrong thing to do. So we have to say that our design is objectively wrong precisely because it is objectively right.

Can this be possible? We have to conclude - yes. This is where two wrongs make a right.

It is possible to forget sometimes that we are designing for human beings, and as humans we crave connections to each other. In our pattern-recognising brains - the break in the logical flow, the flaw in pattern - can be the thing that stands out and appeals. It says ‘a human was here’.

Sometimes graphic design (typography) in particular is referred to as ‘the invisible art’ - i.e. if you notice it, you’re allegedly not doing it right. But I would say that there is value in leaving a footprint in the snow. I have, for example, worked with brands who, after user research, have chosen the brand name that focus groups liked the least -because the name gave people a reaction. We all know the Oscar Wilde quote. 

To me, this is also the point where creativity exists. It’s the point that’s wrong, that feels right.

This is where it’s important to remember that whatever design we create also has an original goal that still needs to be fulfilled. A design without a goal is no design at all - and if we forget this, then we run the risk of creating something entirely of style - devoid of substance. 

So the job of creating engaging, human-feeling design becomes finding the sweet spot at which the goal is objectively fulfilled - within a framework that is itself somehow imperfect.

So how can I, as a logic-loving designer, make good designs - how do I make my designs right? Simply - I just do them wrong.

Wrong-Right-Thumbnail.jpg

Two Wrongs Make a Right

What is a Dashboard?

Dashboards transform raw data into actionable insights, empowering users to make informed decisions and drive better outcomes.

A dashboard is a visual display of key performance indicators (KPIs) and other relevant data points, designed to provide a quick and easy-to-understand overview of a specific process, system, or business activity. A Dashboard will typically aggregate data from multiple sources and present it in a concise, organised, and often interactive format.

Why are Dashboards Important?
Dashboards play a crucial role in modern data-driven decision-making for several reasons:

<ul><li>Improved Visibility: Dashboards provide a centralised view of critical information, eliminating the need to sift through multiple reports or systems.</li><li>Faster Decision-Making: By presenting data in a clear and concise format, dashboards enable users to quickly identify trends, patterns, and anomalies.</li><li>Enhanced Monitoring: They facilitate continuous monitoring of performance, allowing for timely intervention when necessary.</li><li>Increased Efficiency: Dashboards automate data aggregation and visualisation, freeing up time for analysis and action.</li><li>Better Communication: Dashboards provide a common understanding of performance across teams and departments.</li><li>Goal Tracking: Dashboards are excellent tools for tracking progress toward specific goals and objectives.</li></ul>

Why Dashboards Need to be Designed Correctly:
A poorly designed dashboard can be counterproductive, leading to confusion, misinterpretation, and poor decision-making. 
Here&#39;s why proper design is essential:

<ul><li>Clarity and Simplicity: Overcrowded or overly complex dashboards can overwhelm users and obscure important information.</li><li>Relevant Metrics: Including irrelevant or misleading metrics can distract users and lead to incorrect conclusions.</li><li>Data Accuracy: Inaccurate or outdated data renders the dashboard useless.</li><li>Effective Visualisations: Using inappropriate chart types or colour schemes can make it difficult to interpret the data.</li><li>User Experience (UX): A poor user interface can make it difficult to navigate and interact with the dashboard.</li><li>Context: Data without context is meaningless. The dashboard needs to supply the correct context for the information it is displaying.</li></ul>

A good Dashboard has:

<ul><li>Visual Representation: Uses charts, graphs, tables, gauges, and other elements that are visually immediate, and easy to parse. </li><li>Real-Time or Near Real-Time data: Often updates automatically to reflect current data.</li><li>Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): Highlights the most critical metrics for monitoring performance.</li><li>Customisability: Allows users to tailor the display to their specific needs.</li><li>Actionable Insights: Provides information that enables users to make informed decisions.</li></ul>

Does your business need a Dashboard?

Dashboards are used across a wide range of industries and applications:

Business

<ul><li>Sales dashboards: Track sales performance, revenue, and customer acquisition.</li><li>Marketing dashboards: Monitor website traffic, social media engagement, and campaign performance.</li><li>Financial dashboards: Track revenue, expenses, and profitability.</li><li>Project management dashboards: Monitor project progress, deadlines, and resource allocation.</li></ul>

Healthcare:

<ul><li>Patient dashboards: Track patient vital signs, medication adherence, and treatment progress.</li><li>Hospital dashboards: Monitor bed occupancy, patient wait times, and staff performance.</li></ul>

Manufacturing:

<ul><li>Production dashboards: Track production output, efficiency, and quality.</li><li>Inventory dashboards: Monitor stock levels, order fulfilment, and supply chain performance.</li></ul>

IT:

<ul><li>Network dashboards: Monitor network performance, server uptime, and security threats.</li><li>Help desk dashboards: Track ticket resolution times, customer satisfaction, and support team performance.</li></ul>

Education:

<ul><li>Student performance dashboards: Monitor student grades, attendance, and progress.</li><li>School administration dashboards: Monitor attendance rates, resource allocation, and budget tracking.</li></ul>

Transportation:

<ul><li>Logistics dashboards: Monitor delivery routes, vehicle locations, and shipment status.</li><li>Traffic dashboards: Monitor traffic flow, congestion, and incident reports.</li></ul>

To learn more about how Soak can support all of your dashboard requirements, email us at info@soak.co.uk. We&#39;d love to hear your ideas!

Dashboard.png

A Deep Dive into Dashboards

Effective data visualisation is not just about presenting data; it&#39;s about telling a story. 
By carefully selecting the right visualisations and framing the data in a compelling narrative, data visualisation designers can help us understand the significance of the data and its implications for the real world.

At Soak, we transform raw data into meaningful and impactful visuals, utilising the key themes of storytelling.

Clarity, Simplicity and Accuracy:
Prioritising the primary aim of any data visualisation project is key; what story are we telling? 

We interrogate, clean, transform and model data to reveal information, support decision-making, and inform conclusions. By using a foundation of data integrity, data visualisations should accurately reflect the core themes and messages behind the raw data. 

Innovation, Creativity and Narrative:
Working with our clients, we help to establish the right personal style and narrative that reflects their brand and voice. Once their style and creative direction is found, we challenge conventional approaches and break boundaries. Our carefully crafted visualisations and narratives communicate a more impactful and memorable way of sharing information.

These themes are interconnected and work together to create effective and impactful data visualisations. By adhering to these principles, you can ensure that your visualisations are not only visually appealing but also informative, insightful, and trustworthy.

To learn more about how Soak can support all of your data visualisation requirements, email us at info@soak.co.uk. We&#39;d love to hear your ideas!

Storytelling.png

Data Visualisation: The Key Themes of Storytelling

BETFRED

Ezra

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

HSBC

Harvard University

Games Workshop

Selected work

We designed fully responsive prototypes that evolved through several iterations, resulting in a flexible, modular interface that could accommodate the large number of activities on offer and the unique requirements of each venue. 

Complex, multi-tenant applications must be technically robust and adaptable to the ongoing requirements of the business. The underlying architecture was carefully considered to dovetail with Gravity&#39;s IT infrastructure and numerous 3rd party software solutions.

Gravity

Gravity are an international active entertainment brand offering immersive gaming, e-karting, trampolining and climbing activities across 20+ sites, including the UK, Germany and Saudi Arabia.

Gravity-listing.png

The power of play

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 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

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

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

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

We help businesses and organisations unlock the true value of Digital and Data.

home-video.mp4

poster.png

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

We help businesses and organisations unlock the true value of Digital and Data.

Selected work

The power of play

European education survey

Visualising industrial decarbonisation

The economics of climate change

The power of play

Visualising industrial decarbonisation

European education survey

The economics of climate change

/ Our Clients

/ News and insights

Two Wrongs Make a Right

A Deep Dive into Dashboards

Data Visualisation: The Key Themes of Storytelling

Human capital animation

Closing the protection gap

Dynamic economics dashboard

Digital toolkit

Research highways