Show notes
We are now sponsored by Qlik. You can download it for free here. Great episode here folks! We have Stamen‘s CEO Eric Rodenbeck on the show to talk about “Visualization Going Mainstream”. Moritz took inspiration from Eric’s Eyeo talk “And Then There Were Twelve – How to (keep) running a successful data visualization and design studio.” and decided he must come on the show. Stamen is a design studio in San Francisco founded in 2001 by Eric. They have been real pioneers in data visualization and cartographic mapping with the production of great apps and libraries such as Pretty Maps, Trulia Hindsight, Crimespotting and many many more. (See also our episode with Mike Migurski) With Eric we discuss a broad range of important topics including: how to manage a vis business, how to have an impact with visualization and visualization success stories. Enjoy the show! LINKS Eric’s talk at Eyeo Stamen’s Digg Labs visualization Founder of Digg Kevin Rose First word art / last word art Book: Maps and Legends Out of Sight, Out of Mind – Pitch Interactive’s Drones Visualization James Bridle’s Dronestagram Stamen’s Crimespotting Project (mapping crime in San Francisco and Oakland) maptime.io: open learning environment to learn how to make maps The Atlantic’s Article on: Why I Am Not A Maker Stamen’s Work with San Francisco Museum Of Art TRANSCRIPT Thanks to Mary from Two Main, this episode has a full transcript! Thanks so much, Mary! MORITZ STEFANER: Hey everyone, Data Stories #48. Moritz here. Hey, Enrico, how are you doing? ENRICO BERTINI: I’m doing great. MORITZ STEFANER: Yeah? Very good? ENRICO BERTINI: Getting buried by snow, yeah. MORITZ STEFANER: I was about to ask you about the weather. I finally have a good reason to ask you because there’s a big “blizzmas” in New York, right? ENRICO BERTINI: Yeah, I don’t know. It didn’t seem to happen. I’m so disappointed. I don’t know. The news was very bad yesterday, but I don’t know. Doesn’t look like a big storm so far, and the kids are having lots of fun around here playing with the snow. MORITZ STEFANER: So everybody takes time off work and plays in the snow. Nothing bad about that. ENRICO BERTINI: Yes, it was just perfect yesterday. I was supposed to teach at 6:00, and NYU sent me a message around noon or so saying that after 4:00 pm everything is cancelled. So I just tried to have some fun with the kids – nothing special. Well, actually special. How about you? MORITZ STEFANER: Yeah, nothing special. Just catching up with projects. I mean we just recorded the other episode so there’s no big updates from me. But if you listen to that, you know what I’m up to, so I think we can dive right in. And today we have a really super special guest, and it came when I was just catching up on Eyeo talk. So I missed last year’s Eyeo. I don’t know how that happened, but somehow it did. And so I had to catch up on Vimeo, and I saw Eric Rodenbeck’s talk. And the minute after I finished the talk I wrote him an email to invite him to Data Stories because it touched on so many things that are important to me and I’ve been thinking about. It wasn’t very personal – just a great talk. And so I thought we should have him on the show, and here he is. Hey Eric. ENRICO BERTINI: Hi Eric, welcome. ERIC RODENBECK: Hello. MORITZ STEFANER: Great to have you here. ENRICO BERTINI: Very glad you’re here. ERIC RODENBECK: Thank you. MORITZ STEFANER: That’s really fantastic. I mean Stamen has been on our list for a long time. We had Mike Migurski, so it was sort of halfway covered, but of course now with Eric we have the real deal and it can sort of follow up on the second half. And all of our listeners, you should now, if you have the chance now, if you’re not on the bus or somewhere, ideally pause and go to the Vimeo link we put on the blog post and first watch the Eyeo talk because I think we will just pick up where he left off at this point, and we will refer to many of the points there. And as I said, it’s a great overview of the last 10 years of Stamen. Or how long does Stamen exist yet, Eric? ERIC RODENBECK: Since 2001. So gosh, it’s going to be 14 years now. When we started, I thought we only had maybe four or five years before Google came in and the machines took over. Turns out there was a lot more to do. MORITZ STEFANER: Yes, and there were many really great issues you touched on in your talk, and the one that was really where I got the most curious, and also one that I keep pondering about and discussing with people, is this whole issue if there is a market or let’s say the changing role of creating bespoke data visualizations – very creative, crafty data visualizations – because of course on the one hand it’s the business that I’m in so I have a strong personal interest, and I think there is also something very interesting that happened in that field over these last 15 years. And obviously Stamen has been a huge part of that, maybe even leading the whole development. So I think that’s the first topic I would really like to discuss with you. How do you see that? Is there still a need for creating highly bespoke and crafty data visualizations? Or do you feel 95 per cent of data visualization challenges maybe can be tackled now in standard tools? What’s your take there? ERIC RODENBECK: So on the one hand I think about it all the time, and on the other hand I have no answers, only in the sense that it’s so close and personal that it’s almost like I can’t see the whole field because I’m so connected to it. But I think very clearly there is still a need for this. And when I say “this” I mean the creation of these custom experiences. The way that I think about it on a good day is that this is – if you think about data visualization as a technical exercise primarily driven by code, there is clearly a lot less work than there used to be just in the sense that, you know, Plot.ly and Tableau and all these companies and our friends at Carto DB make the kind of basic “get your data visible” much easier. Or Import.io is now doing things like having desktop-based web scrapers and – MORITZ STEFANER: And when you started out there wasn’t even Google Maps, right? Let’s keep that in mind. Google Maps came only in 2005. ERIC RODENBECK: Yes, this is all fairly recent stuff. The way I think about what’s been happening is that just because there is a program called Photoshop doesn’t mean that people don’t need to take pictures anymore, and it doesn’t mean that there isn’t a need for highly custom work in this area. Now maybe if you’re somebody who made a living designing blur filters, maybe you need to find something else to do. But I think that the practice of data visualization is about more than the creation of a suite of filters or the creation of tools. I think that if we think about visualization and mapping as a creative field and as a communications field, and as a field that has to do with the kind of communication of information not just kind of in a neutral sense but in a kind of active open sense, then it seems clear to me that there is a whole lot more to do. MORITZ STEFANER: I tend to agree, absolutely. But at the same time I feel like maybe the whole market is changing and maybe our roles are also changing more. As you say, in the beginning it was even hard to get anything on a map or to do something that’s not a line chart or a bar chart. ERIC RODENBECK: Much less to get hired for it, right? I mean you had to really explain to people what this stuff is. MORITZ STEFANER: Right, right. In the beginning I vividly recall the Digg Labs visualizations because they were sort of for me the first time I saw something really unusual from a big company, you might say – not just from an art school. Was it there that – how did these projects develop? Did the clients come and say we want something mind-blowing new? Or did they come and just say let’s see what you can come up with? And how do clients frame projects maybe today? Is there a change, or how did that develop? ERIC RODENBECK: In this case, it was very much something that was in the mind of Kevin Rose. I mean he was so excited about having basically his finger on the live wire of what was happening on the internet. It was just such an amazing feeling to think that you could kind of in real time get a sense of what kind of news was breaking. And it was really his vision to have a couple of visualizations that would really shine a light on what was going on, because the front page was just much too quick for anybody to pay attention to. We tried to bring our own vision to that and to come up with our own take on that and then also our own – Kevin, to his credit, was very open to experimentation. And so we came up with multiple other visualization types beyond the first two that he came to us with. So I really have to give him a lot of credit for having that vision and believing in us. He’s a real visionary. But I would say it’s really a mixed bag as far as how people come to us for this work. I think that 14 years is a long time, and if you look at the kinds of expectations that people have now around data visualizations, it’s just total night and day from what it was before. I can remember going to the New York Times and talking to them about mapping and data visualization and they were really resistant to it. They had this idea that people didn’t understand how to zoom and pan and click on a Google Map. You remember that? And now they’re just, like, doing amazing work. You look at what Shan Carter is doing over there; you look at what Mike Bostock is doing – and it’s being done at the highest level, in real time, as part of a news-making exercise. So you used to have to explain to people what this was, and now the field has basically just completely opened up. There is a much higher level of sophistication when people are coming to us and asking for this work. It’s not about “can you get our data on the map?” It’s more about “can you communicate this thing that I’m having a hard time communicating, using all of the technology and design tools at your disposal?” – which, to me, is much more interesting. ENRICO BERTINI: Do you think there is a specific reason why this happened? Is it more – do you think this is due mostly by a technological transformation? Or what? ERIC RODENBECK: Yes, the technology has gotten much, much easier, but also the set of expectations people bring to it. As my friend Ben Cerveny used to say, the literacy level around this has all gone up, partially as a result of work that we’ve done and very much because of work that people like you are doing, that people like Ben Fry are doing, Casey Reas. All these practitioners have been banging this drum of making data visible for years, and so the market is just more sophisticated than it used to be. MORITZ STEFANER: Yes, and this development is still going on. And if you think back five years or three years even, as you say, what people expect from data visualization, but also what they know already and what we can all build upon as a pattern or as an established cultural thing, narrative techniques, or, as you say, map UI. We can presuppose that now and do something with it. And a few years ago you had to explain it and experiment. ERIC RODENBECK: Yes, and so this is in some ways what I was trying to get at in the talk that I gave. What do you do when suddenly the thing that used to be your own special little secret sauce that only you and a few other people knew how to do becomes something very widespread? Do you pack up and go home? Do you find something else to do? Or what else is there? And I think this is a really good moment for us as practitioners in this field to really kind of step back and take a look at what we’re actually trying to make happen because it’s not just about poking a stick in the eye of the establishment. It’s not just about something that no one has ever seen before. It’s about generating and maintaining real value through this work and becoming a vital part of the conversation about what’s happening in the world. And that’s just very different from uncovering a shiny new thing for the first time and holding it up. There is a lot of freedom and latitude in doing it for the first time. Doing it for the third and fourth time and doing it well and demonstrating mastery is, I think, a different proposition. MORITZ STEFANER: OK, and it’s a much more long-term and slow and often invisible process, right? So it’s of course much easier to impress somebody with a one-minute video of this beautiful thing, but often it’s much harder to explain why a year-long dialogue with a client was interesting or worthwhile. So do you feel this? Do you feel it’s getting harder to do sexy types of projects or sexy work in that sense – like something that everybody finds immediately compelling? ERIC RODENBECK: I think I’ll come back to my friend Ben here. He talks about thinking about what we do – and when I say “we” I mean you and we also – less as designing software and more about designing fashion – kind of situating this work less as a kind of, like, I make this tool, then I make this tool, then I’m finished and more about engaging in a practice of making new things within a culture that’s moving forward. So you’re kind of situated both in a kind of technical context and in a creative context but then also in a cultural context. Certain things resonate at different times. It’s less about a kind of quantifiable “this is what’s next” from a development perspective and it’s more about a kind of cultural “this is what’s next” from a kind of societal perspective. And I’m going to say this a bunch: I think it’s a much more interesting time now than it was then. There’s so much more to do. ENRICO BERTINI: So while watching your talk I was always thinking about is going mainstream a good thing or bad thing. And I think going mainstream, I mean we should celebrate that. I mean we’ve been doing this viz thing for quite many years now. And the fact that it’s going mainstream is probably due to the fact that it’s very successful. But at the same time I think my opinion is that if something goes mainstream, it doesn’t mean that many more good things are going to happen, right? I mean probably there will be a lot of new ideas, new transformations. So probably it’s going to be very exciting anyway. I’m curious to hear what’s your take on that. ERIC RODENBECK: I’m just thinking about it a lot, not just in terms of data visualization but also in terms of what’s happening to cities. I don’t know if it’s happening in Europe so much, but I know that in the United States we’ve reached this point where cities are going mainstream, where they used to be these kind of edgy places where you moved to as a young person and you helped develop something or you moved to as an artist. And now all the people are here, and it’s getting kind of weird for those of us who have been on the kind of developing edge of cities for a while. I’m looking around at a lot of these places that I used to think of as kind of hip and edgy, and they’re just kind of not anymore. They’re something else. And I’m not willing to just simply say cities are over or, you know – which no one is saying that cities are over. But I guess what I’m finding in the world to be quite interesting as a kind of zone of discovery is just what happens when – like really what happens when these edgy things become well settled. What is the opportunity there? It might be because I’m getting older and I have a kid and I’m less interested in moving to the next new, hip neighbourhood. But I’m just really starting to think about putting down roots and thinking about having a way of working that works in the long term. MORITZ STEFANER: I think this gentrification perspective is a really good one. I have never seen it like this, but probably it’s true that, yes, everything fresh and hip and totally edgy and cutting edge, you know, at some point it needs…
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