If you want to visualize something in its fullness you have to look at every perspective and every angle, and that means - sometimes uncomfortably - looking at things you don't want to look at.

I think everyone is struggling somewhat with presentation. The Internet is generally well designed, if you look at the most popular websites, so we expect our visuals to be at that level of quality. When you sit in a presentation and you're looking at nonsensical pie charts and the like, your audience does disengage. People across a range of industries, not just science, are struggling with their communication because their output doesn't compete with what people see on a day-to-day basis.

What I tend to do is blend quantitative with the qualitative to allow me to plot the qualitative data in some way. It's a question of what quantitative data are most applicable. So I'm playing with that, merging the two.

It's enjoyable to just drink in an image. It's effortless. That struck me as an interesting way of looking at it: I do all the grunt work so you can enjoy.

Data is the new soil, because for me, it feels like a fertile, creative medium. Over the years, online, we've laid down a huge amount of information and data, and we irrigate it with networks and connectivity, and it's been worked and tilled by unpaid workers and governments.

If you want to visualize something in its fullness you have to look at every perspective and every angle, and that means - sometimes uncomfortably - looking at things you don't want to look at.

Sometimes the data has a sense of a structure within it, especially if I'm looking at networks or relationships, which generally lend themselves to a certain style.