Catching Up With Giovanni Magni of Accurat Design Studio
By: Sarah Kay Miller
Tags: Creativity, Design, Dataviz, Data Science, Data Visualization

SK: You’ve told me before that a data viz is only as good as the questions that are being asked. Can you explain why you think that is? And what questions are you interested in right now? What questions aren’t being asked?

G: Data visualisation should solve problems: We are not artists, we are designers. Don’t get me wrong, this does not mean that we don’t need art in projects. Accurat’s work has clearly shown the importance of aesthetics in data visualisation.

What I’m saying is that clients and people have problems, and they come to us for solutions. Problems might be clear, specific, and business oriented (“We want to make more money with our platform”) or experimental and ethical (“Let’s find a new way to convey this message”), but we have to focus on finding the solutions that help solve the problem.

The questions that aren’t being asked are: What was the context? What was the goal? I see a lot of people debating on how charts might or might not respect all the statistical rules of charts and interpretability of visual models, while really few understand that every single rule—even the strongest ones— could be shaped and adapted if it will make the project more effective. It is the same with complexity, but that’s another story.

SK: How can data viz practitioners become better at asking questions?

G: We should take as much as we can from positive design critique. One of the things that we are trying to do in Accurat is foster self-critique and take internal moments when our work could be discussed and our choices doubted.

Thanks to the work and approach of Amin Al Hazwani, our director of design operations, we are working on making this possible. It takes time to point out the multiple possible solutions for a problem, to discuss them, to understand the context and the designer’s choices. Hopefully this will make the team more oriented to self-critique and our projects will keep on getting better and better.

SK: There aren’t many data viz studios in the world, and I think Accurat one of the largest ones. How does Accurat’s structure of designers and developers work? What does that collaboration look like? Are there unique outcomes from that setup?

G: When I started working at Accurat there was only one developer, but right now there are more developers than designers. I think it’s the normal evolution of things since we mainly work with digital products and applications. Even when we create something different (such as exhibitions), due to the nature of our work we always have a more technical side in all of the projects where we need the support of coders.

We try to work together from the beginning; it’s not always simple but it’s important, and it even happens that great ideas also come from developers.

Recently a thing happened that made me glad of our process. We were working on a project with basic chart models (bar charts, line charts, etc.) and within a discussion about a specific task the developers explained to the designers the best logic given their experience with similar projects and due to typical chart behaviour. The roles were reversed and that was brilliant! We have been able to create a data visualisation culture on the whole team, and I’m super proud of this.