Information is material culture, not visual decoration

We often treat information as if it only lives on screens. As if data is something we look at, charts are something we read, and knowledge is something we file away. But information is so much more than that. It is material, and it always has been.

Census tablets were carved in clay, maps stitched in tapestries, calendars knotted with rope and thread. Wedding bands encode vows and a running medal encodes a story. These objects are information in physical form.

When I encode jewellery with data, I’m not creating a “visualisation.” I’m creating something much more durable, something you can experience, you can wear, you can pass down. This is not an exercise in analytics. What I’m building toward is not data visualisation, but instead information made material and experiential.

The invisible deserves the same care as the visible

The work that determines whether a system is humane or hostile is almost always invisible. This is true in software design, and outside of it. Organisational structure, decision frameworks, the way focus gets allocated across a quarter. These are the conditions underneath everything a user touches, and they're the things that get the least design attention.

We spend hours on the surface of a button and minutes on the process that determined which button gets shipped. We obsess over interface polish and tolerate decision-making that wastes the time of every designer downstream of it.

This principle of invisibility applies far beyond the reaches of digital space. Hidden disabilities reshape lives without showing on the outside. Careers get interrupted by caregiving or illness, and disappear from the official record. Grief settles into rooms without being acknowledged. Entire species and ecosystems fade into distant memory because they’re not immediately visible. The dominant systems — corporate, cultural, ecological — leave enormous amounts of important material in shadow. Either because it's structurally hidden, or because attending to it is uncomfortable, or doesn't fit the kinds of stories the systems know how to (or want to) tell.

I'm deeply drawn to this second kind of invisible material. These hidden subjects that the world has agreed to look past. Not because design alone can fix any of it, but because making something holdable, durable, and experiential is the first move that makes the next move possible. Gaining attention is the first design move. People don’t act on what they can’t see.

My work is to design both kinds of invisible layers with the same rigour we give to the visible ones. The platform underneath the product. The org underneath the platform. The principles underneath the org. And, increasingly: the lived experience underneath the categories the world has the language for. Both kinds of work matter.

Range is rigour and form is the through-line

At times, I’ve felt my multi-passionate background is a liability. I’ve wondered if it’s too broad, too scattered, not enough depth in any one domain. But ultimately, I think this framing is wrong, especially for the work I do.

Theatre gave me presentation, rhythm, and audience. Editorial design sharpened hierarchy, storytelling, and voice. An MFA in fashion built my systems thinking: a garment is a small architecture, a collection a set of parts that need to be a coherent whole. Product design grounded me in structure, how form behaves when people move through and interact with it. Cybersecurity raised the stakes with what it costs when invisible systems fail. Data visualisation gave me method. Each domain made the next one legible.

But there's something underneath the range that I only recently saw clearly. Every one of those domains is a form-making practice. Theatre puts emotion into staged form. Music puts time into audible form. Fashion puts identity into wearable form. Editorial design puts argument into printed form. Photography brings presence into the frame. Data visualisation puts information into visual form. Art gives statements and emotions colour and gesture.

The training and experience I've accumulated across 25 years (including both university and career) isn't a random multi-passionate background. It's a deep, multi-domain education in how to give invisible things material form.

This is what unifies my entire thesis and practice. Not the subjects, not the industries, not the job titles. The method. Wherever I turn the work — toward a platform, an organisation, a piece of personal data, a hidden subject the world looks past — I'm doing the same thing: taking something that was interior, dispersed, or unseen, and giving it form that can be experienced and understood.

Phosphorescence: making the invisible visible is how I create light

From Julia Baird, who borrowed the word from marine biology: phosphorescence is light produced from within, generated rather than reflected. Light that exists because of the darkness, not despite it.

I've come to understand my practice as phosphorescent in mechanism, not just in spirit. Making information material, making invisible systems visible. The same conviction runs through making women in tech visible, making the slow erosion of coral reefs findable, making the daily reality of hidden disabilities legible. These are not separate activities. They are the same activity: generating light in spaces that were otherwise dark.

To reference the jewellery as data example again — encoding data in this form doesn’t just make it legible. It forces it to occupy space, cast a small shadow, become a presence. When I make an org's invisible decision flows explicit, the team doesn't just understand the process, they can navigate by it. When I write from inside a senior seat that very few women occupy, the seat doesn't just exist privately, it becomes findable for the women who come after me. In each case, something that was hidden becomes a small source of light. Not a spotlight. A glow.

The mechanism extends beyond design. Anywhere there is invisible material that wants form — interior experience, unseen grief, somatic dysregulation, the residue of careers interrupted — the same practice applies. Take what is hidden. Give it form. Watch it begin to illuminate the space around it.

This is the unifying frame. The reason the design leadership and the data art and the writing and the jewellery — and whatever comes next — are all the same practice, even when they don't look like it. They are all ways of generating phosphorescence in conditions that would otherwise stay unlit.

Generative over analytical. Form over explanation

Most data work is analytical. It takes data and produces understanding — charts, dashboards, reports, explanatory graphics. The output is insight. The viewer reads the numbers off the visual and walks away knowing something they didn't know before. This is the work the design industry is built around. It is useful and necessary.

It is not what I'm interested in for my data art practice.

The practice I'm building works through analysis and out the other side. Data goes in, something new comes out — and the output is irreversible, embodied, or experiential rather than explanatory. The question shifts from what does this data reveal? to what does this data produce? A bracelet that encodes a month is not a report on the month. It is a thing the month became. The data lives inside the form rather than next to it.

Both modes require rigour. Analysis earns the right to generate. The first without the second is a report. The second without the first is decoration. The work I'm building requires both — analytical foundation underneath generative output. Without the analysis, the form has nothing to hold. Without the generative move, the analysis stays where most analysis stays: explained but not embodied.

This applies across media. A beaded bracelet encoding daily habits. A flow field driven by organisational structure. A generative texture derived from lived experience. A physical artefact that holds data in material rather than pixels. Digital or physical. Interactive or static. The common thread is that data is treated as a creative input — a material to work with — not a problem to solve.

This is the methodological commitment. The practice begins with observation and sustained looking at data, at natural systems, at lived experience, and ends with something that holds what would otherwise disappear. The rigour is in the looking, the work is in the holding. The data alone doesn't make the work; the form alone doesn't either. The practice lives in the movement between them.