Lately I have been learning more about both business intelligence and data intelligence. I do not work with the numbers themselves — but with the experience around them: branding, communication, culture, and philosophy. By shaping communication around a data platform, I have been able to explore this space, and what you might call design intelligence: branding, onboarding, and simplification.

First, a little about data intelligence and business intelligence: it is about collecting, structuring, quality-assuring, and analyzing data to create understanding and support decisions. Dashboards, reports, and insight systems. A picture of the state of an organization. Spend, sales, customers, product, and the connections between them. From this, analyses and decisions can be made. But we still depend on people: to get them to share, understand, and gather around data.

Branding

Many organizations do not have a data problem, but a problem of coherence, coordination, and shared vision. Data lives in silos, with different languages, different audiences, and different definitions. Some can code, some cannot. Some have business understanding, others IT understanding. The result is fragmented truths and little shared understanding. This is where design intelligence comes in: we have built branding and a visual identity around the data platform, a communication package, simpler words and concepts, reusable illustrations, and a strategy for building communication materials, guidelines around language, and examples of messages and scenarios.

It was about bringing the organization together around one voice. A shared visual language. Making a strategy accessible, understandable, and alive. Something people actually understand and care about across disciplines. A shared narrative about what data is, and how it can be used. That way data becomes something the organization owns together — not something that belongs to a small technical team.

Onboarding

For people to share and bring information together, they first need to understand what they are sharing, and why. Why it matters. Onboarding is about bringing new users in — not with long manuals, but with clear steps, simple explanations, and an experience that feels inviting. When people understand the system, they dare to contribute. They know what it does, and they see its value. If they get stuck, they know where to find information they can trust, and where to get help. Design intelligence is about making that journey short and clear, so more people can follow along, and consistent so everyone gets the same good experience.

Simplification

Business intelligence (BI) often has its own language: KPIs, aggregations, dimensions. But if we want to reach a broader audience — not just analysts and leaders — we need to speak more simply. Design intelligence is about translating specialist language into something everyone can understand. Short words. Concrete examples. Visual support instead of long text. When language becomes democratic, more people can join the conversation, make informed choices, and feel they have an overview. It is not dumbing down — it is opening the door. When we shift focus from the numbers themselves to the idea of sharing data, everything changes.

Design intelligence can help ensure that business intelligence and the data platform are not just a place for reporting, but a space for dialogue. A cultural infrastructure. A place for learning and shared understanding. For stories and identity. Design becomes a tool for simplifying complexity. And perhaps this is where I begin to sense what design intelligence really is. It is about shaping spaces for understanding. Language for the complex. Shaping systems that do not only inform, but invite. That do not only measure and optimize, but make room for people, different perspectives, and meaning.