Technology is advancing at breakneck speed (flying cars, anyone?), but what if we told you that some of the essential software we rely on every day is maintained by just one or two people?

That’s the surprising reality revealed by The People Holding Up the Internet, an interactive data story from sheets.works, that explores the individuals quietly keeping our digital world running. The creators analysed the code histories of 23 open-source software projects that underpin our phones, browsers and servers. Their findings? 11 of the 23 projects had just one or two people making regular contributions.

Take Paul Eggert, a UCLA lecturer who maintains the time zone database used by billions of phones and computers largely in his spare time. Or Lasse Collin, who maintains xz, a compression tool widely used on Linux systems, and whose project became the target of a sophisticated backdoor attack in 2024.

Through interactive charts, timelines and individual stories, the visualisation shows who’s doing the work, how concentrated responsibility has become, and how little funding some of these essential projects receive.

We love how the visualisation reveals just how much of our digital infrastructure isn’t maintained by enormous teams or billion-pound budgets, but by a handful of largely invisible individuals.

Designing for Climate Intelligence

We’re really excited to be hosting a live online discussion with Arc and Snowflake on a critical question: How do we make complex climate information genuinely useful to the people who need it? As partners on TransitionArc and ResilienceArc, we’ll discuss what it takes to move from vast amounts of evidence and fragmented data, to climate intelligence that people can understand, trust and act on.

Tuesday 8 December, 12:30–13:30 (GMT)

Register to join us and put your questions to the panel: https://streamyard.com/watch/ABwrVfXByaFf

This newsletter is brought to you by award-winning data design studio Applied Works. Want to submit something to Rows & Columns? Share it with us here

AW Springboard 2026 has launched! We're offering dedicated, fully funded design support to bring your research project to life. With our expertise in data visualisation, user-centred design and strategy, we’ll help you make a bigger impact.

If you’re selected, we will partner with you to:

• Learn more about your audience and the problems they need to solve.

• Lead workshops to draw out the most interesting and engaging stories.

• Generate initial concepts and recommendations for audience engagement.

“The AW Springboard programme has been transformative for Project Seagrass. Their design and research support not only helped us refresh part of our identity, but also gave us the tools to tell the story of our app, SeagrassSpotter, in a far more engaging way than ever before. It’s also helped us to secure more funding.” – Project Seagrass

Past organisations that have been selected for our support include Surfers Against Sewage, Project Seagrass and Open Cities Lab.

Apply by 18 December 2026 (midnight, GMT)

More info and apply

Who are we?

We’re a leading data design studio based in Somerset House, London. Together with our clients, we imagine and realise next-generation data tools that lead to better decisions and outcomes.

Over our 20 year history we’ve been lucky enough to work with brilliant minds and some of the world’s most influential organisations, including Chatham House, the United Nations, Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance, and Al Gore’s Generation Investment Management.

It’s the time of year when some of the team get very excited, namely our resident fun-guys Radhita and Valentina, because Kew Gardens is opening the doors to its Fungarium.

Did you know Kew’s fungi collection is the largest and one of the oldest and most scientifically important in the world? And it has a new data portal, making 1.1 million specimens – including some dating back centuries – freely accessible from anywhere.

Why all the fuss about fungi? Beneath our feet, vast mycorrhizal fungal networks connect with plant roots, helping plants access nutrients, supporting ecosystems, and playing a vital role in the global carbon cycle. Despite their importance, we still know surprisingly little about where these underground networks are, and how they are changing.

Which brings us beautifully to this month’s Rows and Columns feature, A Hidden Infrastructure. The project is a huge collaborative effort, bringing together decades of soil measurements with robotic imaging and machine learning so that underground fungal networks can be mapped on a planetary scale. The interactive 3D globe reveals predicted fungal density across the world, while the accompanying story moves between the extraordinary scale of the networks, how scientists mapped them, and what their decline could mean for ecosystems, agriculture and conservation.

What’s particularly interesting to us isn’t just the research or the visualisation, but the collaborative infrastructure behind it. Researchers, institutions, field campaigns, technologies and datasets have come together to create something incredibly powerful.

This feels familiar to us at Applied Works, where the tools and stories we design are often part of a much wider data ecosystem, with multiple organisations contributing evidence, infrastructure and expertise towards a shared understanding.

Sustainability Trends Report 2026 is now live

Generation Investment Management’s Sustainability Trends Report is now live for 2026, highlighting the need for a faster transition. Seven years into our design partnership, we continue to roll out new features, including the interactive dashboard A Decade of Struggle.

AI, climate data and the responsibility of design

Our Head of Strategy and Partnerships, Hannah Foulds, explores why interrogating the evidence behind a tool needs to be as much a part of the design process as deciding how that evidence is communicated. Read the full article on LinkedIn.

This newsletter is brought to you by award-winning data design studio Applied Works. Want to submit something to Rows & Columns? Share it with us here

Applied Works, Arc and Snowflake — partners on TransitionArc and ResilienceArc — will come together for a live conversation exploring how climate and transition data can be transformed into useful, trusted and accessible intelligence that supports better decision-making.

📍 Online

🗓️ Thursday 17 September, 12noon – 1pm (BST)

🖊️ Register here (for free)

The discussion will be hosted by Emma Thwaites, Founder and Executive Chair of Allegory and Strategic Advisor to the Open Data Institute, who will lead a conversation exploring the journey from evidence to action, and what it takes to make climate intelligence genuinely useful for decision-makers.

The conversation will explore:

• Why making sense of fragmented climate information is one of the biggest challenges facing organisations today

• How trusted climate intelligence is created — from evidence and analysis, through user-centred design, to integration into real-world decision-making systems

• The complementary roles of domain expertise, experience design and modern data infrastructure in enabling better decisions

Register for free

This newsletter is brought to you by award-winning data design studio Applied Works. Want to submit something to Rows & Columns? Share it with us here

Nearly a billion people were in the path of the solar eclipse on 12 August. If you were lucky enough to catch a glimpse, you’ll know just how captivating it can be. Now one data visualisation allows you to explore 5,000 years of them, that’s 11,898 in all, on a single interactive globe.

Alexander Bogachev’s Where the Shadow Fell marks each point where an eclipse reached its greatest extent. The global dataset also shows which eclipses were actually visible in your area, how much of the Sun disappeared, and when you might next see one. A second view places those eclipses in the sky at their actual altitude and bearing.

It’s a lovely example of what interaction can add to a large dataset. Rather than trying to explain nearly 12,000 events at once, the visualisation lets you move between scales – five millennia, one eclipse, one city, one moment looking up at the sky. We especially like the way the project makes an enormous timescale feel personal. Five thousand years of astronomical data is difficult to comprehend but asking what happened, and what will happen, above a place you know makes it immediately relatable.

This newsletter is brought to you by award-winning data design studio Applied Works. Want to submit something to Rows & Columns? Share it with us here

This month we spoke with Freddie Hong about Drawing Lines, a collaborative performance piece developed with Giacomo Pini, Sue In Kang and Ali Mohammed. Since 2022, the project has been staging a real-time negotiation between a violinist, a dancer and an AI drawing tool that captures the dancer’s movement.

The title, Drawing Lines, carries a double meaning. Literally, it’s mark-making, physical gestures translated into digital traces. Conceptually, it asks, where do you draw the line between human creativity and AI agency?

The live performance is an intersection of four disciplines – drawing, dance, music and technology – in constant creative negotiation. Hong tells us that when the violinist plays and the dancer moves, an Optitrack motion-capture system tracks their movement and translates it directly to the visual. It’s always listening. No AI or generative model touches this layer, every line drawn is built from motion data alone. Meanwhile, the music layer runs on a system, nicknamed Corpus, that trains and learns to improvise in the violinist’s style over the course of the performance itself. Violinist and AI building towards a duet.

Everything converges in the climactic scene, where drawing, dance, music and machine all collide. Then each piece starts to wind down. Dancers exit, the lines fade, and for the final 15 to 30 seconds, the AI plays on its own with no human control over what it produces. It’s a brief window of what Hong describes as “controlled agency”.

Instead of presenting AI as spectacle, we love how Drawing Lines turns it into something tangible and invites a live audience to understand and engage with it.

This newsletter is brought to you by award-winning data design studio Applied Works. Want to submit something to Rows & Columns? Share it with us here

In a period of rapid technological change, and with the world’s first trillionaire emerging from the technology sector, the relationship between technology and power has never been more visible. But it is far from a new story. It stretches over five centuries, from colonialism to militarisation.

Calculating Empires, an interactive map and physical installation based on research by Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler, traces these imperial pathways and offers a new way to understand our current technological power structures in a deeper historical context. It shows how past empires created many of the conditions that shape today’s systems of power.

The map brings together a huge range of systems, from shipping routes and cartographic tools that supported colonial expansion, to the bureaucratic systems used to classify populations, to the telecommunications networks and military technologies that shaped the modern world.

At a time when discussions about technology are often dominated by the newest tools and trends, Calculating Empires offers a longer perspective. It shows how visual thinking can help us make sense not just of information, but of history itself.

ResilienceArc launched this week

ResilienceArc launched this week during London Climate Action Week 2026, the latest addition to our partnership with Arc. Together we’re combining physical climate risk analysis, adaptation assessment, and resilience benchmarking in one tool, making it easier for the people and organisations building resilience in a changing climate to explore, understand and act.

Explore ResilienceArc

This newsletter is brought to you by award-winning data design studio Applied Works. Want to submit something to Rows & Columns? Share it with us here

This month we’re featuring a story from the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute about the 2025 landslide and tsunami in southeast Alaska.

The article reconstructs the collapse using seismic readings, satellite imagery, maps and timelines to build a growing sense of tension. You know from the beginning that the mountainside is going to fail, and the narrative comes from watching the signals build.

What makes it especially effective is that the data itself becomes the storytelling device. When small tremors increase in frequency, and visualisations narrow from regional scale to the cliff face, the reader is placed in the uncomfortable position of recognising a pattern that nobody was actively monitoring at the time.

Rather than doing a static report, this approach to storytelling shows how pacing, sequencing and scale can completely change how technical information feels. The article lets the reader move through the evidence in the same way the event unfolded – slowly, then all at once.

This newsletter is brought to you by award-winning data design studio Applied Works. Want to submit something to Rows & Columns? Share it with us here

The climate tech landscape has expanded by roughly 20% year on year globally. It’s a term that covers a broad range of technologies, from renewable energy and low-carbon materials, to food systems, carbon removal and climate data tools.

But as climate tech expands quickly and globally, it’s becoming really hard to see the overall shape of it. New ideas and solutions are emerging across a multitude of sectors at once, often with different levels of maturity and urgency. As a result, there is also a growing need for organisations to make sense of the landscape – what exists, what’s scaling, and where the gaps still are.

The Climate Tech Map is a large collaborative effort, developed with input from researchers, investors and practitioners working across climate and technology. It aims to bring structure to the rapidly expanding landscape of climate tech by organising it into a clear map that lets you move from sectors into more specific opportunity areas and technologies.

We love how this collaborative project turns a multi-faced, system-wide topic into something standardised and easy to browse. Each entry gives just enough context to understand what something is and where it sits, without overloading the user. The emphasis is on orientation rather than detail, and builds a clear picture of how everything connects.

This newsletter is brought to you by award-winning data design studio Applied Works. Want to submit something to Rows & Columns? Share it with us here

This month we’re featuring London-based data artist Tiziana Alocci. Her practice explores how to visualise things that are hard to measure or often overlooked – emotions, personal stories, and other intangible traces of the human experience.

We heard Tiziana speak at Kingston University about a recent project that uses Google Street View to collect snapshots of London’s vanishing sky over a 16-year period. She later added sound, introducing the emotional layer missing from the images alone. The project became Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost, and is now being developed into a book about data absence.

Tracking the invisible could be applied to many of the issues we care about. From biodiversity loss, ecological change and migration to people’s relationships with landscapes, subjects rarely fit neatly into conventional datasets. Across her portfolio, Tiziana has explored topics ranging from noise pollution to the meaning of home.

Tiziana told us: “Absence of data is data, and its absence is telling a story. Datasets always look boring before you listen to them. Not all data needs to be analysed. Sometimes it can be just experienced. I’m glad when people don’t ask ‘what does this chart mean?’ and they just listen to the data, which is the whole point”. Tiziana talks about her latest project, Frequencies of Belonging, in her most recent newsletter.

This newsletter is brought to you by award-winning data design studio Applied Works. Want to submit something to Rows & Columns? Share it with us here

This month we’re giving a round of applause to Robin Hawkes, Senior Data Visualisation Engineer at Octopus Energy, whose open experiments on LinkedIn invite feedback and encourage constant improvement and iteration from the wider data viz community. This is the sort of open innovation we’re always on board with.

One of Robin’s experiments is a live map of Great Britain’s electricity generation. It shows where wind, solar, nuclear, biomass and other sources are, and what’s happening across the system right now. What we like is the spatial comparison – you can see where wind farms actually are, what the wind is doing in those locations, and how that sits alongside solar clusters or nuclear stations. Energy feels physical rather than abstract.

Robin regularly shares iterations and thoughts on LinkedIn, inviting feedback and treating the project as a work-in-progress. We’re always glad to see people building tools like this out loud.

This newsletter is brought to you by award-winning data design studio Applied Works. Want to submit something to Rows & Columns? Share it with us here

We’re kicking off Rows and Columns in 2026 with some genuinely good news, the BBC has announced some real progress on the critical issue of renewable energy.

Using provisional data from the National Energy System Operator (NESO), the article shows that 2025 was a record year for renewable electricity generation in Great Britain. The most striking change came from solar power that produced over 6% of Britain’s electricity, an increase of nearly a third compared with 2024.

The article also shows how far the system has already shifted. On roughly a third of days in 2025, at least half of Britain’s electricity came from renewables. Carbon intensity has fallen sharply over the past decade, even though fossil gas still plays a significant role. The article is clear that further progress will depend on grid upgrades, energy storage, and other low-carbon sources.

By using time of day as the x-axis and time of year as the y-axis, the BBC’s data visualisation showing solar contribution naturally adopts the circular shape of the sun. The addition of the colour bar shows how the solar share of electricity generation has intensified over time.

Overall, this piece and its use of data visualisation stands out for its simplicity and clarity. It’s a concise, well-designed snapshot that makes a complex energy transition legible, while also highlighting that meaningful progress is already underway.

This newsletter is brought to you by award-winning data design studio Applied Works. Want to submit something to Rows & Columns? Share it with us here

Somerset House is in full festive mode, ice rink and all, and our team caught a new exhibition here this week. Called Infinite Bodies, it explores what happens when the human body works in tandem with machines and digital systems.

The exhibition centres on multi-award-winning choreographer Wayne McGregor and the breadth of his collaborations, which include Radiohead, Google Arts & Culture Lab, and Industrial Light & Magic. It brings together an impressive mix of partners across visual effects, interactive design, photography, music, fashion and film. The work collectively traces the many ways movement can be translated, reinterpreted and transformed.

McGregor shows us his process. He shares the books that have influenced him and opens up his notebooks. It’s a reminder that the research and exploration stage is often just as compelling as the final outcome.

One of the installations that really resonated with us was Future Self. Created in collaboration with Random International and Max Richter, this interactive LED environment mirrors the full length of a viewer’s body and captures movement, dispersing it into a three-dimensional cube made up of over 10,000 tiny points of light.

The exhibition highlights the gap between human intuition and algorithmic logic. In this space, where bodies become data but still hold onto their unpredictability, the work truly feels alive. This echoes how we feel about working in Somerset House. Having just marked five years at Makerversity, we’re reminded how much this unique place has broadened our horizons.

This is our final Rows and Columns before Christmas, so we’re wishing all our wonderful followers a very restful break!

AW Springboard 2025: Apply by 17 December

Do you hold data or research with the potential to solve a global problem, but need decision-makers, policy-makers or even the general public to engage with it?

Applied Works is offering dedicated, fully funded support to bring a research project to life. With our expertise in data visualisation, user-centred design and strategy, we’ll help you make a bigger impact.

More information and apply here

This newsletter is brought to you by award-winning data design studio Applied Works. Want to submit something to Rows & Columns? Share it with us here

Every day, millions of people inhale air tainted by industrial smokestacks, traffic, and fuel combustion, often without knowing where the pollution comes from. According to WHO, outdoor air pollution contributes to 4-7 million premature deaths annually, with fine particulates (PM2.5) being among the deadliest offenders.

Climate TRACE has released a first-of-its-kind tool showing the real-time flow of air pollution plumes. The tool uses satellites, AI, and ground sensors to pinpoint emissions from over 660 million sources globally, mapping plumes and tracing them into communities.

The new tool exposes the direct connection between the climate crisis and air pollution, and shows which communities are most at risk. It tracks nearly all sources of human-caused PM2.5 pollution, from fossil-fueled power plants and factories, to ships and planes.

Climate TRACE co-founder and former U.S. Vice President Al Gore said in this press release, “Climate TRACE is releasing this new tool as a call to action: now that we can clearly see how and where people are being exposed to this harmful pollution, our leaders must do something to reduce it.”

What struck us most about this tool is that it’s built by a coalition of AI specialists, data scientists, researchers, and nongovernmental organisations who are focused on something called ‘radical transparency’, with the bold aim to influence policies and create change.

AW Springboard programme 2025 launched

Do you hold data or research with the potential to solve a global problem, but need decision-makers, policy-makers or even the general public to engage with it?

Applied Works is offering dedicated, fully funded support to bring a research project to life. With our expertise in data visualisation, user-centred design and strategy, we’ll help you make a bigger impact.

More information and apply here

This newsletter is brought to you by award-winning data design studio Applied Works. Want to submit something to Rows & Columns? Share it with us here

Apply by 17 December 2025

Applied Works is offering dedicated, fully funded support to bring a research project to life. With our expertise in data visualisation, user-centred design and strategy, we’ll help you make a bigger impact.

We’re seeking an organisation from anywhere in the world to collaborate with on a pro bono basis.

More info and apply

If you’re selected, we will partner with you to:

• Learn more about your audience and the problems they need to solve.

• Lead workshops to draw out the most interesting and engaging stories.

• Generate initial concepts and recommendations for audience engagement.

A few words from last year’s AW Springboard winner, Project Seagrass

“The AW Springboard programme has been transformative for Project Seagrass. Their design and research support not only helped us refresh part of our identity, but also gave us the tools to tell the story of our app, SeagrassSpotter, in a far more engaging way than ever before. It’s also helped us to secure more funding.

“From building personas to communicating our threat-mapping work, the Springboard enabled us to connect with new audiences, amplify the impact of our citizen science work, and strengthen our efforts for global seagrass conservation. These insights have given us a clearer sense of who we’re speaking to, how to reach them, and how to motivate them to engage with seagrass conservation. We’ve already seen the benefit.”

More info and apply

ChatGPT is now the fifth most visited website in the world and we are depending on generative AI more and more in daily life, with its use rising at an exponential rate. But what’s the environmental cost?

We’re only just starting to get a real sense of the extent of AI’s energy footprint, but a recent report forecasts that by 2028, data centres will account for 12% of total electricity consumed in the US.

With this in mind, Oio has created the Hot Air Factory, a device designed to make AI energy costs tangible. Inside the ‘factory’, a small AI computer processes any queries without connecting to the cloud. Each time it works, it releases a tiny puff of hot air, spinning a bright yellow pinwheel to make you feel its effort.

The factory app gives relatable examples of what each request equates to, whether it be boiling two cups of tea, 90 seconds of hairdryer use or toasting five pieces of bread. So if you’re going to overthink life’s meaning with your AI companion, at least you can do it consciously.

We’ve been following the project for a while, and love how such a complicated ideation process has resulted in a device of such deceptive simplicity. There is no opting out of technological progress, but the first step to cleaning up our AI dependency is seeing its cost clearly, even if it’s through hot air.

Upcoming workshops

Data visualisation

Tue 28 Oct 2025, 9am-1pm (GMT), Somerset House, £249

Data visualisation doesn’t have to be expensive, there are many free tools available. However, selecting the right tools, knowing how to uncover narratives within the data, and effectively engaging and communicating with your users are what make a visualisation truly impactful.

User experience design for online tools and products

Tue 7 Oct or 25 Nov 2025, 9am-1pm (GMT), Somerset House, £249

In this interactive half-day workshop, our trainers will guide you through the key principles of UX and explain why it's important. They'll demonstrate how to interview users and use these insights to create personas, considering user needs, motivations, and pain points. You'll also participate in exercises designed to help you lead user needs workshops within your organisation.

This newsletter is brought to you by award-winning data design studio Applied Works. Want to submit something to Rows & Columns? Share it with us here

At Applied Works, we’ve spent over two decades working with organisations such as the BBC, Chatham House, the United Nations, and Al Gore’s Generation Investment Management to communicate complex issues through clear, engaging digital design.

These workshops are a practical extension of that experience, designed for people working with data, building digital tools, or looking to strengthen how they communicate evidence and insight. They’re ideal for people working with data who are seeking guidance on how to effectively engage their audience. No prior design expertise is required.

Whether you're looking to build better tools, sharpen your storytelling, or drive change with data, we’d love to support you.

User experience design for online tools and products

Explore the key principles of UX and why it's important. Discover how to interview users and use these insights to create personas, considering user needs, motivations, and pain points. You'll also participate in exercises designed to help you lead user needs workshops within your organisation.

📅 Dates:

• Tue 7 Oct (Somerset House) – from £189

• Tue 25 Nov (online) – from £139

🔗 Full details + book here

Data visualisation for data professionals

Discover the key principles of data visualisation. Learn how to identify the right stories for your audiences within the data, and how to prioritise the most relevant information for those audiences. You’ll also participate in exercises designed to help you create your own data visualisations using free tools.

📅 Dates:

• Tue 28 Oct (Somerset House) – from £189

🔗 Full details + book here

About Applied Works

We’re the team behind the BBC’s most shared page ever, The Great British Class Calculator, and we’re an award-winning data design studio based in London’s Somerset House.

We combine data, editorial, and user-centred design expertise to help organisations present and discuss complex themes with different audiences around the world. We love challenging projects that allow us to work on subjects we care passionately about, such as the Sustainable Development Goals, social inequalities, and the circular economy.

This month we’re journeying through the history of human invention, from the stone tools of prehistory, to the self-driving cars of today. The Historical Tech Tree, conceived by artist and researcher Étienne Fortier-Dubois, lays out a vast, branching graph of innovation, tracing how each invention builds upon its predecessors and showing where it then leads.

Each node in the interactive timeline represents a technology, connected by lines showing unexpected patterns and the non-linear nature of innovation. Technologies don’t simply replace one another, they emerge, diverge, and cross-pollinate, forming an interconnected web of necessity and serendipity.

Far from complete, the map is designed to keep growing. At the time of writing, the visualisation covers 1,963 technologies with upwards of 2,315 interconnections between them, spanning roughly 3 million years.

The tool invites us to explore how ideas build on one another, and where our stories about invention fall short. Unsurprisingly, the tree has inspired lively discussions critiquing its gaps – for example, the sometimes narrow definition of technology overlooked fields like textiles. These gaps underscore the project’s value, inviting contributions to help narrate progress.

Visual storytelling like this doesn’t just trace the past, it reshapes our perspective on the present and future.

Learn more about the tech tree here.

Upcoming workshops

Data visualisation

Tue 28 Oct 2025, 9am-1pm (GMT), Somerset House, £249

Data visualisation doesn’t have to be expensive, there are many free tools available. However, selecting the right tools, knowing how to uncover narratives within the data, and effectively engaging and communicating with your users are what make a visualisation truly impactful.

User experience design for online tools and products

Tue 7 Oct or 25 Nov 2025, 9am-1pm (GMT), Somerset House, £249

In this interactive half-day workshop, our trainers will guide you through the key principles of UX and explain why it's important. They'll demonstrate how to interview users and use these insights to create personas, considering user needs, motivations, and pain points. You'll also participate in exercises designed to help you lead user needs workshops within your organisation.

This newsletter is brought to you by award-winning design studio Applied Works. Want to submit something to Rows & Columns? Share it with us here

Vital information about our planet's health is hidden beneath the sea. This month, we're highlighting a project that takes us into the depths of our oceans and delivers crucial conservation data into the hands of researchers, conservationists, and policymakers.

MiCO (Migratory Connectivity in the Ocean) is an initiative launched by scientists at the University of Queensland. Through interactive mapping, it reveals the vast distances that marine species travel, and highlights the links between breeding and feeding grounds. For the first time, everyone has access to migratory pathways in a way that’s both global and granular, allowing for more informed decisions about protecting our oceans.

What this tool lacks in sophisticated design, it makes up for in its simplicity and clarity. Users can easily explore the map themselves. And by making this tool freely available, the team is opening doors for collaboration and action across countries, giving everyone the opportunity to engage with vital conservation data.

Upcoming workshops

Data visualisation

Tue 28 Oct 2025, 9am-1pm (GMT), Somerset House, £249

Data visualisation doesn’t have to be expensive, there are many free tools available. However, selecting the right tools, knowing how to uncover narratives within the data, and effectively engaging and communicating with your users are what make a visualisation truly impactful.

User experience design for online tools and products

Tue 7 Oct or 25 Nov 2025, 9am-1pm (GMT), Somerset House, £249

In this interactive half-day workshop, our trainers will guide you through the key principles of UX and explain why it's important. They'll demonstrate how to interview users and use these insights to create personas, considering user needs, motivations, and pain points. You'll also participate in exercises designed to help you lead user needs workshops within your organisation.

This newsletter is brought to you by award-winning design studio Applied Works. Want to submit something to Rows & Columns? Share it with us here

We’re nestled deep in the corridors of London’s beautiful Somerset House, and thankfully, every now and then, we have a wonderful exhibit in the building that gives us a reason to surface. This month, that reason is the London Design Biennale, a global showcase of international ideas, values, solutions, and provocations.

Nations, organisations, and transnational collectives are each given space, or ‘pavilions’, to explore their response to the exhibition's key theme, which changes every year. The theme for 2025 is Surface Reflections.

Ever the predictable data designers, it’s no surprise that our favourite piece is a data visualisation. This is Rows and Columns, after all. Records of Waiting: On Time and Ornament is a collaborative piece in the Polish pavilion that visualises time — not through pixels but through wood, carved by the hands of artisans and school students. Curated by Jakub Gawkowski, Monika Rosińska, and Maciej Siuda, the work captures 12 scenarios that involve waiting for something…19 minutes for an ambulance, 13 years to pay off a mortgage, 2 years for gender recognition documents. The installation weaves together two kinds of data, the cold logic of minutes, and the raw emotion of lived time — frustration, boredom, hope.

We’re most impressed by how this piece transforms humdrum bureaucracy into pattern, delay into ornament, and emotion into texture. It shows that we all wait, but we don’t all wait equally.

This newsletter is brought to you by award-winning design studio Applied Works. Want to submit something to Rows & Columns? Share it with us here