Phil Harvey and Dr Noelia Jiménez Martínez - Data a Guide to Humans

Thank you also to the following people for their support

Matt Lintott

Technology is the easy part; its people that are hard.

I dont know who said this to me first, but throughout my career it has always been proved true. Ever since I was the unfortunate Macintosh fan in a Windows-dominated school nerd crowd, I have walked the line between people and technology. This has often made life awkward. For example, I did Computer Science, Maths and Communication Studies at A-level. An unusual mix that made scheduling impossible at college, so I was forced into statistics rather than discrete mathematics. When I was looking at university options, I picked Artificial Intelligence as a pure BA rather than a BSc under Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence. This made the careers advisor grimace and say, No one will hire you with that, they all want computer science. Even when I got to university, in my third year I chose Japanese Language Culture and Society as an option rather than anything more technical. Hanging out with anthropologists was a lot of fun.

This same topic raised its head when I was trying to be a 3D graphics artist. A government careers counsellor on a careers hotline told me in a brutally clear manner, You dont have any artistic training, you are a technologist. Look for a job where you can use technology to help artists.

It took a number of years of not being a programmer (trying to be a 3D graphics person), then being a programmer (helping 3D graphics artists), then being a start-up founder and CTO before I really met data in a meaningful way. Data revealed itself to be a resource that perfectly supports a new understanding of the world and all the people in it. Over the course of five years, technology became transparent to me, and through it I could see our world in the data.

I have walked this line between technology and people long enough now that the experience is crystallising and is, I hope, worth sharing. For me, this is represented by the idea of data empathy .

While the technology industry is growing fat and opinionated on a constant diet of fast innovation, it is obvious to me that it is starved of human skills.