Thank you, Salt Lake City,
it is lovely to be here.
Apology for my accent;
I'm from Manchester in England.
(Whistles)
Thank you.
Thank you.  That's my brother.
(Audience laughs)
I knew there was a reason
why I brought him here.
Probably like many of you in this room,
my mom has no idea what I do for a living.
(Audience laughs)
So, and I love her dearly, she loves me,
but she has no clue.
She's even been to one
of my solo exhibitions;
still no clue.
So, being an arty-type,
you know, flouncy, arty-type,
some people call me the Kim Kardashian
of data visualization.
(Audience laughs)
I thought, mom,
what I'll do, I'll do you a drawing
because, you know, I'm an artist, right?
So,
I drew this, and I said,
mom, you see, what I do it's,
it's art and design and technology,
and where those three things meet,
it's like the shape of the things I make.
And she looked at me blankly.
I said, no, mom, look, right,
it's like, you know,
art, design, no, there!
See it?
And she looked at me again and she said,
I told my hairdresser
you invented Google Maps.
(Audience laughs)
So I,
I looked at her and thought,
I thought for a second and
then just said, close enough.
But you know what?  It is hard, you know for,
it's hard for me to know
what I do to be honest
because it's kind of eclectic.
I flew into Salt Lake City a few years ago
and then went to Park City
for the Sundance Film Festival
and did an installation for AirBnB
where I made 12 tiny receipt printers
where people could share
stories via text message,
and we made 5000, a
jungle of 5000 stories
that was told in a week
in a special AirBnB house.
No one told me that it snows in Park City,
and I hate the snow, so.
But anyway, that was great.
It was good, honestly.
And then, you know, so that's like
an electronic thing I've done,
and then there's, I have no
qualifications by the way,
I left school at 16 with
0 qualifications.
I don't even have a qualification in art,
but this is a piece of work
that is now in the permanent
collection of MOMA,
and I remember getting the
email from MOMA saying,
we'd like to do this with you,
and I just stared at that email
for a good 10 minutes,
and I wanted to ring my art teacher up
from my high school days
and ring her up and just
laugh on the phone.
(Audience laughs)
But I didn't do that because
I didn't have her phone number, and so,
and this image is
every second of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo
in one image, and it's
called Cinema Redux,
and this to me is data,
and we're going to be talking about data.
And so that to me is data,
and it can be realized as a print piece,
but it can also be realized as
things you can hold in your hands.
I asked myself the question,
what would happen if you
could bump into data?
You know, you're walking
along and go, whoops!
Well, just tripped over
some data there, you know.
So, this is environmental data.
These are not renders,
these are physical things
that are 3D printed in wood,
and they're environmental data
that was collected around London,
and then we put them
back in the environment
for people to find.
So it was born from data,
then goes back into the environment.
But when I think about this
eclectic mix of what I do,
there is a commonality, and
I think what I am really
is a collector.
I've always been a collector.
Before I got into design, I used to
go around vinyl record shops
when I was a lot younger,
and I was a lot cooler, to be honest,
and I would go around vinyl
record shops and find
interesting break beats and rhythms,
and I would compile them
for a little record company in London and
create new things from readymades.
It's what Marcel Duchamp talks about,
and I like the idea of taking
things that already existed
and recombining them in
interesting and new ways,
and I think that is what I still do now.
All these years, I'm only 30 years on
from when I was doing that,
and I'm now doing the same,
but with digital technology.
And so to do that,
I have,
well I kind of, it's kind of
a closet of digital things
that looks like this.
And they're little experiments,
they are things that do one thing well.
I might wake up in the morning
and say, how do I wrap a line
around a sphere, for instance.
I might also wake up and think,
why have I not got any friends?
(Audience laughs)
But that's,
that's something else entirely,
not for you to worry about.
So, these are like little
experiments that I do,
and you'll see how I,
so I collect these, and
I think it's important
as human beings to collect experiences
across a range of things,
and that could be collecting
little code snippets,
or little visual things,
or whatever it is,
and we have a great device with us now,
we have our phone so we can collect things
all the time, so it's great.
But I encourage everyone to
do this, make little things,
as you'll see that they combine
to make something a lot bigger.
And it's about this.
It's about collect, curate, combine.
Collection on its own is not enough.
We need to curate and filter.
I think we need to filter the world
a lot more than we do.
Set your bar really high.
Basically, Ed Sheeran's
down here.  I'm joking.
(Audience laughs)
Alright, so.
So, curate things, and then
it's about combining them,
using an aesthetic, a
composition, consideration.
This is an artist called Bela Kolarova
who's sadly no longer
with us, a Czech artist.
I love this stuff,
and maybe I need to get out more, but,
this is ---
you can see these are just readymades.
These are things that
already existed in the world,
but then you apply composition,
you apply an artistic thought,
and they become something else.
So, on the left, they
are just paint swatches
that she's created a pattern with,
but I love the one on, on,
sorry, the one on the left,
I really love, and they are just
button fasteners that you walk past
every single day in the supermarket
and pay no attention to them,
but if you apply a kind of
graphic design mentality to that
and you apply the idea of collection
of many things to create one thing,
then it becomes something else,
and I like the power of that.
I was working on a project with Google
that was a top-secret thing
that no one has ever seen,
so I could just be making this up
to make me look good, but,
I'm fascinated by what is data.
And to me everything is
data, everything is a number.
These were, and this project
for, that we worked on
with Google for a while,
there was just basically lots of sketches
using a thing called a pencil.
I'm a bit, I'm a pencil geek,
and I love a pencil because
it has a built-in progress bar.
(Audience laughs)
That's my best joke, by the way.
(Audience laughs)
Okay, reaction.
So, these, so these are
my pencil shavings from my
whole time I spent with Google,
and I kept them.
Again, don't have any
friends, and I kept them,
and I spread them out and realized
that these were side
effects of the process
and they were effectively
a timeline of data
of my time spent working with Google.
And so I get paid to do this, luckily.
And so it's lovely when
Pluralsight got in touch with me
and said
we have this amazing event,
and to be honest I didn't
really know the company
before they got in touch, so
I had to do a lot of research,
and they said we could give you some data
and could you make something for us?
And of course, I said, yes, absolutely!
Just please don't send
me to Park City again.
(Audience laughs)
And so we started that process,
and they gave me a CSV file
with 1.3 million rows of data,
and I had to take that
and make it beautiful.
So,
this is the start of every process.
We worry too much about
beauty at the beginning.
Everything starts out ugly.
Now, I'm going to show you a slide now
that's taken me years to research.
It's been really hard to get this slide together.
It's taken me a lot of time.
When I show it,
you may need a few moments to
make it sink into your brain.
This is the moment where
you want your cameras ready
for the Twitter moment.
(Audience laughs)
I want to show you my
incredibly complex process.
(Audience laughs)
That's it.
So, you know, it starts out,
I don't care what you
do, this is the process.
You start out and you go (gripes),
what am I doing, I don't, what!
And then you're trying to get
to this moment of clarity,
this singularity at the end.
Perfection is this cruel
temptress that you can
never get to perfection,
though I have to say this event is pretty close, right?
But, you're trying to get
to this moment of perfection
signified by this circle,
but of course the circle isn't perfect.
So you're trying to
get to this process,
drill it down and
filter down and hone things,
and craft, and craft, and craft,
and so, that's how I start the
process of making this stuff.
And I do my own collection
of things with this data.
So, that's how I started.
So, this was, I started to look
at how to group things
and I was almost like
thinking about Petri dishes,
and creatures, and things,
and so you can see that,
you know, this didn't
really make a lot of sense,
but what I'm trying to find here is,
what is the shape of this thing?
How does this thing look?
How's it feel?
And what does the data,
what are the shapes
that are revealed by this data?
I'm not trying to create some kind of
amazing infographic at all,
I'm trying, this is more on
the art side, right?
So, and also, I would encourage everyone,
when you first start out,
create something to criticize.
You start a conversation,
share this stuff,
share the ugly things,
because when you share that stuff,
it will start a conversation
and someone might say something
that says, oh, that's interesting,
and you didn't think of that.
So this two-way collaboration,
I always really like that bit.
I also, you know, I don't,
even though I work with data quite a bit,
I don't actually, I've got to confess,
I don't get inspired by data vis blogs,
or data vis people.
No, some of them are okay,
but I'm more interested in other things.
So, I would encourage you
to increase your bandwidth
of your input,
because you're going to get better output.
So this is Bridget Riley,
a pioneer of the '60s, and
I really love this quote
because I think it sort of
summarizes when you're
trying to mess around
and play around and see what emerges,
and for me,
I really like this, the
mathematics behind this.
This is the head of a sunflower.
It's called a Vogel spiral,
kind of a Fibonacci thing going on here,
and I've always liked this pattern.
I think it's kind of interesting,
nature blows my mind.
How does nature know how to do that?
It's, what?
So, I've had,
I've used this kind of algorithm before,
and I used to make,
so, I go back to this kind
of closet that I mentioned
at the beginning, and I
thought, hang on a minute,
I've got this algorithm that I could use
as a way to lay things out,
and I'd look back in the
closet and I've got this,
this interface that I
did many, many years ago
that used this pattern.
We don't see stuff like
this on the web anymore,
do we, really?
This was done in a thing called Flash.
(Audience laughs)
So now, just for a moment,
can we please have a minute
of silence for Flash?
(Audience laughs)
I loved it, that's why I'm
on this stage, by the way,
I've made my career
making this kind of stuff.
But, I realized though, you know,
I've got those mathematics,
so maybe let's use that.
So this is that algorithm.
I can lay some dots out
and I thought, okay, let's have 300 dots.
The outside dots represent
20 hours, and the middle
are a shorter timespan,
and every dot is 4 minutes' difference,
and I would use that to
lay out, lay out the data
because I, within the data
that I got from Pluralsight,
it tells me how long an
assessment took to complete,
and it was from 0 to 20 hours plus,
and we capped it at 20 hours.
Now, what you're trying to do here is
create some texture.  So,
once you start to play
around with these things
and have different dot sizes,
I realized that I could
use the score value to create
different sized circles
and use color to also
show different
score values.
So you can see that you get
different patterns going on,
so I then started to put
that in with the data,
and I then started to create this thing,
just playing around here.
It's kind of got an op art
feel, a pop art feel maybe even.
Op art is black and white,
so it's more pop art I guess.
Again, all those influences coming in,
and then realize, actually, that
when I put this slide together,
it was actually very similar to
Bela Kolarova's one.
I was like, well, that's weird.
And that's what inspiration is by the way.
Inspiration, the difference
between inspiration and copying,
inspiration, you let it
become fuzzy in your brain
and then what happens then,
all your personality
and your idiosyncrasies
stick to that inspiration
and it becomes yours.
So what I ended up making was this,
which is the whole Pluralsight universe
of every course, every assessment,
1.3 million
bits of data in this image.
If you've ever taken an assessment,
you are part of this image.
And then, obviously you
can get close up.  So,
Microsoft Azure Solutions Architects,
don't know what that
is, but it looks cool.
(Audience laughs)
Which for me is the
main thing, right, okay?
React, React is beautiful,
and you see this space
just before the outer ring,
you know, so there's lots of
people taking slightly longer,
and then the majority are kind of on it.
I love how magenta is this like,
someone who's got like,
like a perfect score.
Yeah, it's like, wow, you're
the magenta person.
And so obviously, there's,
and then JavaScript is like huge.
And a few more of these, GitHub.
Ah, I love it, look at that GitHub,
it's just like a beautiful thing, right?
But, then
it's about, you know, Role IQ.
So I thought I would visualize
for some specific roles
in connection with Role IQ.
So this is the Angular Web
Developer visualization,
which makes up JavaScript
and CSS and various other things.
Security Analyst, and I love, you know,
you can see that that's a lot sparser,
but it's still very beautiful.
Server Administrator is
still cool, so you know,
if you've got a really geeky
job, if that's your job,
you can go, yeah, but
look at this,
I am sexy!
(Audience laughs and applauds)
And then,
and then, little Microsoft Azure Admin,
I like as well, you know, so.
So I'm going to leave
you one final slide,
and then we've got a
surprise for you, as well,
because I'm nice like that.
I'm going to leave you with this,
that "Great things are done
by a series of small
things brought together."
So I want you, today,
I hope you continue to make
a lot of small things and
can then continue to make
even better, greater things.
Thank you very much.
(Audience cheers and applauds)
Now,
before I finish, they're
going to have to get me off
with a hook in a minute,
you know, they're going to
chase me around the stage.
I'm not coming off.
Go away.
No, I've got to get a
flight in 3 hours,
but we have
a little surprise for you
that maybe someone else is going to do,
Right here.
Adam Gunn, Creative Director of Pluralsight,
thought it would be a
great idea to make T-shirts
for everyone of this stuff,
so we have got, I've
always wanted to say this,
T-shirt canons.
