It’s Nice That is heading to New York for an evening focused on data and design

The new year is well underway and we’re delighted to announce that It’s Nice That is heading back to New York! We’re teaming up with Wix for another series of events across 2020 at the brand’s new Wix Playground space directly opposite the Whitney Museum. The first of these evenings of talks is on 27 February and the topic is a juicy one: Data, Narrative and Design. To get hold of your free ticket, please click here.

Last year, across three events, we covered a range of topics and hosted a dozen amazing speakers, from creatives using their skills for good causes to designers utilising emerging tools and technologies in their work. On the final Thursday of this month, join us and four speakers as we delve into the fraught but also at times incredibly fruitful link between design and data. Across four talks, we’ll explore how data is being used by designers as a new raw material, allowing them to build engaging narratives and explain complicated phenomena in simple, comprehensible ways.

Part of the Wix Playground Presents series, the evening will be hosted by It’s Nice That’s editor Matt Alagiah and will feature talks from a range of different designers: Mona Chalabi, Barron Webster, Laura Kurgan, and Tal Midyan (you’ll find more information on all these guest speakers and what they’ll be talking about below). Each of them uses data every day in their practices and will showcase their work to the audience.

After the talks, the speakers (as well as the It’s Nice That team) will be sticking around, so you’ll have a chance to continue the discussion over a beer. Read on to learn more about the speakers and what they’ll be covering on the night, or click on the link below to get your hands on a free ticket.

Mona Chalabi

We’re delighted to be joined in New York by Mona Chalabi, a data journalist and The Guardian US’ data editor. You’ll likely have seen her work – digestible and engaging visualisations of complex data – in publications such as The New Yorker, The New York Times, New York Magazine, and of course The Guardian. It has also been exhibited in several galleries in London, including the Tate, The Design Museum, and the House of Illustration. You may have spotted that she did a talk at our very own Nicer Tuesdays in December, where she spoke about the challenges of being a freelance creative and offered some tips on how to fight your corner with clients. At the Wix Playground in February, her talk will be more focused on her work and will see her unpack how exactly she turns huge volumes of complicated data into infographics and illustrations that are both clear and beautiful.

Barron Webster

Also joining us at the Wix Playground will be Barron Webster, who designs new types of computing at Google’s Creative Lab in New York and teaches interaction design at the School of Visual Arts. Much of his career has been about giving people access to information and design tools, including making data more readily available. The RISD Graphic Design graduate was the creative responsible for payinterns.nyc – an online resource that acts as a navigable list of companies and studios in New York that pay their design interns more than the city’s living wage. (He wrote an Opinion piece for us on the subject back in 2018.) In his talk on the 27 February, he’ll focus on this project and Teachable Machine, a Google Creative Lab experiment that lets anyone play with AI and machine learning, in turn giving them a better understanding of how computers use data.

Laura Kurgan

Laura is Professor of Architecture at the Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation at Columbia University, where she is the director of the Center for Spatial Research (CSR). Her work often explores the ethics and politics of digital mapping and its technologies; the art of visualising big and small data; and design environments for public engagement using maps and data. The CSR’s work has been exhibited internationally at the Chicago Architecture Biennial, at the Biennale Architettura di Venezia, at the Oslo Architecture Triennale, and at the Palais De Tokyo. Laura’s work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Fondation Cartier in Paris, while her writings have appeared in the Harvard Design Magazine, Volume, and Architectural Design. At the Wix Playground, she will give us an introduction to the CSR’s work and talk us through the art of data visualisation and how it relates to the way we build our cities.

Tal Midyan

We’re also delighted to be joined by Tal Midyan, a designer and creative director based in New York, who is currently working at Spotify on the company’s global brand and design team. He’s particularly interested in the intersection of popular music culture with design and technology, as you can see in this project for Spotify that saw him and his team create a real-life pantheon of some of the world’s biggest rap artists. The SVA graduate was also behind a recent project that captures and visualises real-time data about how many people globally are listening to Bon Iver’s new album i, i and turns it into a fun and engaging interactive tool. At our event, he’ll talk about his practice more broadly before focusing on this so-called Visualizer for Bon Iver.