Why data deserves good design

Most of the world's most important information — climate policy, ESG regulation, carbon budgets — lives in PDFs and spreadsheets that almost nobody reads.

That's not a data problem. It's a design problem.

Information vs understanding

A table of 500 ESG policies is information. A map you can filter by country and topic, where patterns jump out before you've consciously looked for them, is understanding. The dataset is identical; the difference is design.

Three principles guide every dashboard I build:

1. Overview first — the whole landscape at a glance, before any detail.
2. Filter and zoom — let people carve the data down to what matters to them.
3. Details on demand — full depth is always one click away, never in the way.

(Yes, that's Shneiderman's mantra. It's older than the web and still undefeated.)

Beauty is a feature

Beautiful things get used. A dashboard people enjoy opening gets opened — and data that gets looked at changes decisions. That's the entire theory of change behind this portfolio.