Insight

Data Intelligence spotlight | October 2025

Welcome back to Data Intelligence, your signal in the noise. In this second edition, we continue our exploration of where insight, AI, and design converge. Expect fresh tools, sharp ideas, and gallery-quality work showing how data intelligence is shaping what’s next.

Our selection, this month:
\ CivLab: a new civic tech platform
\ Lead Tracker for NBA games
\ Creative coding map: a visual exploration of the creative-coding ecosystem
\ The Data of Perception: A collection of the world around us

CivLab

Systems can’t be governed if they’re not understood.

That’s the thinking behind CivLab, a new civic tech platform that has built the first complete data model of the San Francisco government. Through a single interface, users can explore how the city operates across entities, spending, legal frameworks, and even the media narrative that shapes it.

Why it matters

There’s a growing sense that we’ve reached peak scrollytelling, where linear, narrative-led interactives, no longer deliver the same impact. CivLab breaks that mould. Its side-by-side design keeps everything above the fold, fusing quantitative and qualitative insights in one viewport.

What makes it truly intelligent is how it layers in contextual depth: LLMs surface the surrounding stories and relationships behind the data, turning raw civic information into living, connected intelligence.

See it in action

Lead Tracker for NBA games

This project visualises over 1.6 million score-changing plays across ten NBA seasons as an interactive 3D terrain. Each game becomes a mountain range where blue peaks show moments a team was leading and red valleys reveal when they were trailing. Users can rotate the view to see the data as a line chart, bar chart, or heat map — answering the question: “What if you could look at your data from different angles, literally?”

Why it matters

It demonstrates the power of orthographic 3D visualisation to unlock multiple analytical perspectives from a single dataset. By treating data as a sculptural form that reveals different insights from different angles (front view for early leads, side view for final margins, top view for comeback patterns), Sueiro creates an experience where spatial exploration drives data understanding.

The real intelligence lies in the interface design: embracing the screen corners for controls, maintaining visual consistency across views, and making 1.6 million data points feel navigable rather than overwhelming. It’s proof that when you match ambitious technical execution with thoughtful UX, even massive datasets become intuitive and engaging

See it in action

Creative coding map

The project Creative Coding Map is an interactive, visual exploration of the creative-coding ecosystem. At its core it maps domains, libraries, languages and tools in the creative-coding world, allowing users to navigate through nodes (for example “domain:text”) and discover how different frameworks, environments and communities connect. You can zoom in on a specific domain, trace relationships, explore clusters of tools or languages, and visually understand the landscape of creative coding in one glance.

Why it matters

It transforms complex, sprawling knowledge about tools, languages and domains into a clear, interactive, visual form, giving viewers intuitive access to relationships that otherwise would require many articles, lists or research.
It fosters innovation: the map invites exploration, encourages finding unexpected pathways or lesser-known tools, and this can spark new ideas or collaborations.

It is also a great tool to promote accessibility: making such a map interactive lowers the barrier for newcomers (students, business stakeholders, designers) to grasp what would otherwise be a daunting list of names and terms.

This kind of approach highlights the value of enabling users to see structure: how things relate, what sits where, what the pathways are and elevates information design from background support into a central value driver.

See it in action

The Data of Perception

Some projects remind us that data reflects our perceptions, the reality around us and the way we see it. Here, Jer Thorp, offers a preview of an evolving project that aims to reveal how people comprehend the colour of birds, starting from Wikipedia descriptions.

Why it matters

The way we translate thoughts into words, text, and numbers often tells as much about the subject being analysed as it does about ourselves. In this scenario, the dataset is composed of descriptions of more than 11,000 species, transformed into a colour library that will become the base of a series of visualisations.

While visualising data gives it form, the true breakthrough often lies in deciding which data to use and what we can learn from their transformation. Whether we speak of colour, perception of the many, or attention to detail, data continue to serve as a tool for interpretation and storytelling. In every project, there is an opportunity, from the very start, to ask how much more the information we already have can reveal and how the chosen methodology shapes its interpretation. This is a question that often leads to surprising results.

See it in action