Decoding Encode 2019

A summary of the key themes from the Encode Conference exploring data journeys in design, journalism & education.

Encode held its inaugural conference in September 2019 & I was lucky enough to attend the full two days of talks, plus the FT workshop run by John Burn-Murdoch and Federica Cocco.

The Conference, put together by Hem Patel & Pierro Zagami, centered on ‘Data journeys in design, journalism and education’. I came out of the conference on Friday evening with the usual post-conference buzz of ideas, inspiration and having met some great new people, but the content and tone of the conference were very different to any I’d experienced before. I definitely hope to attend again in 2020.

Before going any further, I should qualify that I consider myself to be a ‘data’ person with a big interest in design & journalism. I graduated in Geography & Statistics and moved straight into an Accountancy Qualification which has had me working with business data & analytics. Design & Journalism are things that I love to read about & consume outside of my day job, but I cannot claim to have any specific qualification in them.

Without having the chance to speak to all of the other attendees (and therefore this may be completely misguided), I got the sense that this background put me in the minority. I hadn’t heard of a large proportion of the speakers & many of them introduced themselves as working in data visualization studios or as…