We had a chat with the guys from Domestic Data Streamers— it's pretty amazing how they tell stories through data! I would spend a fair bit of time digging through their work. Have a read to hear more on what they do, passion projects they're working on and their take on inters (apparently it'd pretty great as 63% of their mums would do it!)
Give us the elevator pitch on what you do.
Our work is based in connecting people to information in a meaningful way. We feel that we are so fucking surrounded by shitty fake news and branded everything that it is now complex for anyone to see past this way of living. We aim to create free bullshit zones where reality is shown as it is. We work on making the complex simple, on showing the public what’s important for us, and helping people see through empathy, love and innovation. We like to code, design, research, engineer and hack on politics, brands and any institution.
(Sorry for all the swearing, we can get really passionate sometimes)
Whats your take on internships? (do you take interns now?)
As a studio, we hope to offer an experience of self-knowledge as a creative that can be useful for our interns once they step in their professional paths.
To see if we were achieving our goal, we asked our most recent intern, Thomas, if he thought he was having an experience of self-knowledge at DDS.
Our dear Thomas replied: “Yeah, sort of. What kind of question is this? That is very abstract. What I know, is that after this experience I’ve learnt a lot about working in a team and understanding others. And that is what is going to make me a better designer”.
Thank you Thomas, we love you.
We do take interns and like the ones that are proactive, eager to learn, and don’t mind stepping out of their comfort zone. Also, 63% of our mothers would like to be interns in our studio. Yes, we asked.
Are you involved in any mentoring/teaching/workshops and if and how it shapes your practice?
Yes, we teach at several design universities in Barcelona, we are even organizing a master programme for next year and soon we will start our own data-art residence in the studio. We also participate in all the workshops and festivals we can, regardless of the location. It is essential for us to be in contact with people and learn from all the processes. Our projects have an essential part that have to do with interaction, dialogue with people, testing, and pushing our boundaries as part of the experimentation and development of projects in our studio.
Also, we’d love to collaborate in a workshop with Neil deGrasse Tyson so, if anyone who is reading this can make it happen please send us an email at: speak@domesticstreamers.com
Any passion projects you would like to share?
We believe that as designers we are responsible for generating tools of change that overcome today’s challenges.
The Refugee Crisis is something we should embrace as citizens and work on as designers. That is why we are collaborating with Refugee Data, to create together, a reality-changing scenario.
Because this is still a WIP project we can’t show anything yet, but we’ll keep you posted through our website — we might also post interesting stuff on the rest of our social media so we'll leave you the links here too, just in case!
Who’s on the team, what are their roles and why do you love them?
Our team now is unexpectedly big so we need to organise ourselves in departments. We have concept, where steaming hot ideas come to life. Research, where things that need to be researched are researched. Technology, Design and Production, where the real magic happens. We also have a party division.
Everyone in our team is truly special and makes the DDS family diverse and unique. We wouldn’t change our people for anything in the world. (This is a massive cliché —we know— but still it is true).
2017 for you in a sentence.
Make data languages great (again).
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