Data cannot solve everything, but it’s a very good starting point for telling a story. Mummadadda have the ability to look at the tea leaves presented by data and empathetically interpret them into a human story.
A good example of this is when we sat in a corporate box at Twickenham stadium with the England Rugby performance coach, a team of analysts from IBM and red hot UX designer called Tristan Peters. The brief was to see if the Opta data collected on players could be turned into a second screen entertainment experience that IBM could sponsor and co create with The RFUs digital design agency, Aqueduct. This process took place over 3 days with simple hypotheses being put to the performance coach, like, ‘DO England have to play a very different game against Argentina, than perhaps Tonga?” The answer was obviously yes, but then we had to identify characteristic of the game play and map them against historical Opta data. IBM were amazing at crunching this data and analysing it to test the hypotheses. And it worked. Not just for Argentina, but fro all of England’s competitors. We also created a visualisation of the game momentum with interactive turning points and highlights. Finally, we created a module which focused on the individual players and which ones would come into their own and be most crucial against different opponents.
The IBM Trytracker was a massive success and regularly appeared on broadcast TV coverage as a bona fide pre-match analysis tool for journalists and celebrity sports people. It still exists here, although the art direction style has changed. A testament to the power of empathetically interpreting data. And Mummadadda aren’t even rugby fans.
Painting on previous nav page: ‘The fairy feller’s master stroke’ by Richard Dadd, 1855-1864