Hide & Seek, the Creature Inside the Dataset. Re-embodying Data Through Myth, Metonym and Biophilia

Why I’m Running This?

I keep waiting for the era where we finally retire the pie chart. Or at least admit we’re tired of pretending a bar chart is a revelation. And yet, somehow, we’re still here, polishing the same geometries for every datasets.

And I have a suspicion others feel this too. That quiet tension between “just make it pretty” and “just make it clear.” Wanting something that feels alive. As data and visualization become increasingly abstract and as AI tools make image generation effortless,I worry we’re eroding lived meaning.

I’m tired of cleaner charts that stop feeling so distant and beautiful visualizations,that stay emotionally detached. The workshop turns on one lever: Does our data form actually carry the structure, behaviour, and meaning of what it represents?

Before dashboards, humans used fables, myths, and animal stories to communicate complex moral and epistemic truths. Ant colonies taught distributed labour.Seasonal migrations encoded time and memory. These weren’t plain metaphors, they were cognitive structures that made complexity graspable.

This workshop is about bringing them back, without nostalgia, without illustration-for-its-own-sake. We’ll draw from biophilic systems (animals, insects, plants, ecological behaviours) and lore (cultural narratives that already carry meaning), to re-embody data in meaningful, situated ways. Not “data is like ants.” But “information density in this mode follows pheromone-trail logic.”

The structure of this workshop:

I’ll introduce Six Ecologies of Lived Data in this workshop namely: System, Flux, Echo, Adversial, Affectie and Commons. Using these modes, participants reinterpret their dataset into compelling, unforgettable and breathing data lores.

Participants will:

1. Begin with a dataset: Bring or generate a dataset (social, environmental, urban, or cultural).

2. Discover biophilic systems and lore: Learn how to research living systems and cultural narratives using structured prompts and guided inquiry.

3. Deconstruct both dataset and living system: Break down the dataset into behaviours (flow, density, hierarchy, feedback). Break down the organism or lore into structural features (growth logic, swarm patterns, decay cycles, memory traces).

4. Practice metonymic association: Identify precise structural correspondences between dataset behaviour and living system behaviour.

5. Reinterpret through the Six Systemic Ecologies: Apply the mode of System, Flux, Echo, Adversarial, Affective, or Commons to deepen interpretive framing.

6. Prompt and de-prompt with AI: Generate variations, then strip away aesthetic excess to reveal underlying grammar.

7. Extract a visual grammar to create a one-page “data fable”

Who is it for?

This workshop is for designers, data practitioners, students, artists, researchers, and civic technologists who sense that visualization today oscillates between sterile abstraction and aesthetic spectacle. It is especially relevant for early-career practitioners looking to move beyond default charts, AI-enabled designers seeking deeper conceptual control, and cross-disciplinary collaborators working at the intersection of narrative, ecology, and culture.

No advanced technical skills are required. Only access to an AI tool for prompting and image generation, and a simple presentation platform such as Figma, Canva, or Google Slides. They leave with a practical method, a critical AI workflow, and a renewed lens: data can be lived, storied, and situated, not merely rendered.