For Mark Ainsworth, data has never just been about numbers and spreadsheets. Through the lens of psychology and operational research, he has approached data with human beings in mind - both those modelled within the data and the ones trying to make sense of it.

It’s this combination of perspectives, as well as his natural creative flair and ingenuity, that has helped Mark understand data design and the stories it can tell, and utilise the power of cognitive ergonomics. In our recent interview, I tried to unpick how Mark came to view and understand data in the way that he does and how he thinks we, as creatives, can apply some of our natural creativity to something some of us may often look to avoid - numbers.

And it all hinges on something called ‘cognitive ergonomics’.

As Mark explains, ergonomics has traditionally focused on designing physical environments to fit people, but, in his career, Mark’s work has centred around helping individuals make decisions with data.

“Cognitive ergonomics is about using data to optimise how data is viewed or presented by taking into account the human factors that influence how we naturally like to view and understand data,” describes Mark.

“So it’s about optimising how the data is presented to suit the way the decision maker on the other side naturally wants to view or understand it. In order to do this, you need to understand how that decision maker thinks - and there are some universal ways that we, as humans, do that.”

As mentioned in the introduction, Mark is not your typical ‘numbers guy’. With a degree in Experimental Psychology from Oxford and a Master’s in Operational Research from Southampton, he has always been equally fascinated by the human looking to digest the data as much as the data itself.

“From the very beginning, I’ve been interested in how we visually tell stories with data, and I never really feel like I understand some data unless I've looked at some graphs of it,” explains Mark.

“I know people who will just pore over data tables; however, I’ve always been drawn to visualising data.”

For Mark, this interest in visual design started at an early age. “I was first drawn to visual design as a child - I remember having a book on typefaces and being really intrigued by the intricacies of it.” Says Mark.

“I also think I've got a sort of fizzy brain. I'm interested in making connections and often talk in analogies.”

In Mark’s first job as an Operational Research Assistant at British Airways, he became well known in the team for his effective and creative use of bubble charts.

For those uninitiated, bubble charts let you show three bits of information at once. The position left to right, position top to bottom, and size as well.

“What I liked about bubble charts” Mark reveals, “was that if the story you’re trying to get across is one about size, like how many people are of this type, it's a natural, very cognitively ergonomic, way of displaying it.”

“It’s also worth noting that I was doing this work in the late 90s, when Excel and other tools didn't have a bubble chart functionality. But I felt so strongly that this would be a good, intuitive, and natural way of digesting a lot of information all at once and letting people connect ideas together”.

Spurred by the good reaction he got from colleagues, he wrote some code in Visual Basic to help him create more bubble charts that also allowed for the colour to have meaning too. It was this ingenuity that would stand him in good stead in the next chapter of his career at the McLaren F1 Racing Team.

“A pit wall during an F1 Grand Prix is one of the most stressful places on earth”, says Mark.

“An avalanche of data is being crunched in real-time, whilst split-decisions have to be made with confidence and accuracy.”

It’s for this reason that Mark, when he found himself working as a Race Strategy Analyst for McLaren in the early 2000s, looked at how he could help make those stressful decisions a little easier.

“When I joined, sector timing data, which helps the team analyse drivers' lap times, was published on a screen, table style, up to 3 decimal places.”

“So there's an avalanche of digits on this screen and a lot of information to take in. I knew there must be a better way to display and digest what was happening on the track and therefore help the engineers on the pitwall make better, faster decisions on things like when to make a pitstop.”

With this in mind, Mark developed a system, called the ‘McLaren Track Viewer’ which combined the sector times with some clever mathematical modelling he’d studied as part of his Master's to help abstract how many seconds apart all the cars were onto a circle.

The clever maths and vision are impressive enough, but the use of a circle to display this data was also crucial and meant “putting cognitive ergonomics ahead of physical reality” as Mark explains.

“On a circle it's easy to have labels for each of the drivers on the track which don't bump into each other, and the use of the circle meant I could also utilise the gaps between labels to provide even more information in a very user-friendly way - i.e. an equal gap between the labels meant equal times between them, which is all that matters when it comes to exiting a pitstop ahead of your competitor.”

“Before I had created this, I was seeing all my engineer colleagues writing every number down to 6 decimal places, whereas I saw that what we actually needed was to take information away and to focus on what's important”.

As Mark realised, though, that was just one half of the problem. The other was the design.

“With all I had learnt up until that point about cognitive ergonomics, I knew that the design was also crucial. The display had to showcase only the key information, and in a way that made it as easy as possible to comprehend, understand the story it was telling, and therefore allow us to make effective decisions in high-pressure and high-stakes moments”.

In what is arguably the strongest testament to how useful this piece of data and UX engineering was, the McLaren Track Viewer Mark created is still being used 25 years later. Its design has also been copied by every other major F1 team, and it even made a cameo in the recent F1 movie!

“The software’s probably been rewritten several times” adds Mark.

“But the design? Unchanged. That makes me proud.”

“From a design perspective, there are a couple of things I think can help massively when it comes to utilising some of these principles in your own work,” says Mark.

“Firstly, I think one of the crucial skills is distinguishing what is meaningful from what is just noise or distraction.”

“It’s about understanding what is helping to tell the story you’re trying to get across and what is distracting from it or adding unnecessary complication.”

“As a Creative, your superpower will often be in that ability to join the dots and connect data to bigger narratives and trends. To that end, it’s important to be ruthless in determining what data is and isn’t valuable to telling that story, and often less is more.”

Once the data is decided, Mark touches on a Creative's next superpower - understanding key design principles.

“One thing that is often overlooked by your typical ‘numbers guy’ is the clever design tricks that help make the data easier to understand,” explains Mark.

“A good example of this is the careful and consistent use of colour.”

“By careful, I mean being very particular about when you use it and what you use it for. Certain colours have natural associations, and we can also build up associations with certain colours through consistent use.”

“This is why consistent branding is so crucial,” emphasises Mark.

“If you've got a certain business unit and then there's a certain colour that is consistently and exclusively used to represent that, then suddenly somebody can glance at the graph and instantly know what it's showing them. Importantly, they can trust their judgement because they know that you only use that colour or shade for that purpose.”

As well as consistent colour, there are some other rules that Mark has repeatedly followed that have served him well.

“The rule of proportional ink is also something that I often make use of. The rule is that the amount of data you're trying to communicate should have a proportional relationship with the ink used to display it.”

Another visual design rule that Mark has stuck to is around angles.

“Another technique I’ve often found useful is when you’re trying to tell a story of a trend through the use of a graph.” Adds Mark.

“We know from studies that people see the trends most clearly when those lines are around 45 degrees. Ultimately, it’s about remembering that people don’t see a grandient - they see an angle. So if you scale the graph so that the line sits around 45 degrees, people will naturally perceive the trend more easily. Alternatively, if you squash it or stretch it so the line is more or less angled, people are less likely to intuitively recognise the relationship with the data that you’re trying to get across.”

Ahead of the chat with Mark, I was acutely aware of the ChatGPT-sized ‘elephant in the room’ when it comes to how we are approaching data and information crunching in 2025.

I asked Mark how he views the impact of AI on all of this and where he sees it going.

“I think in many ways AI is both a cure and a poison when it comes to helping us crunch data and utilise the power of cognitive ergonomics,” says Mark.

“AI is very good at crunching data; however, it struggles a lot more with the cognitive ergonomics side, as it isn’t able to think laterally in the way humans can."

“Lateral thinking is key when it comes to innovative thinking and design, as innovation requires thinking differently than the humans both around and before you.”

“AI can’t currently do that because it’s you that has the relationship with your colleagues, and, for as long as that is the case, that will always be our crucial, and distinctly human, advantage.”

I get the impression that Mark has a lot more to say on this topic, but perhaps that’s for another article!

For those who would like to explore more on this topic. Here are Mark’s top picks:

1. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 2nd Edition (2001), by Edward R. Tufte

2. Envisioning Information (1990), by Edward R. Tufte

3. Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten (2004), by Stephen Few

4. Visual Thinking for Design (2008), by Colin Ware

Mark’s 25-year career has focused on helping people make better decisions with data, starting with degrees in Experimental Psychology (Oxford) and Operational Research (Southampton), and applied across industries. His journey includes roles at British Airways, race strategy at McLaren F1, customer insights at Tesco, Technology Director at Talent Innovations (a psychometrics firm), Head of Analytics at Smart Steps within Telefónica, and he built and led a 30-strong data science function at investment manager Schroders. In early 2025, he joined ProblemShared as Chief Data Officer.

The common thread of his career has been helping people make better decisions, combining the technicalities of data science with the 'human factors' of people and how they think, work, and operate in teams.

Mark on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ainsworld/

Cover image credit: Mark Ainsworth