When you picture a laboratory, chances are your mind conjures a clean, clinical environment — white coats, centrifuges, the hum of fluorescent lights. But beneath that surface hum lies a different kind of engine. It’s invisible, often overlooked, and yet essential to the success of every experiment: the infrastructure of operational support. The pipes and platforms that quietly keep the science moving.

Mark Trueman has made a career out of helping others do their best work — not by stepping into the spotlight, but by refining everything behind it. As Global Technical Director for CBRE’s Full Spectrum Lab Services, Mark works at the nexus of real estate, technology, and science. His job is deceptively simple: keep labs running. But the reality is far more complex. Lab equipment today is more expensive, more fragile, and more interdependent than ever. A broken centrifuge no longer just means a pause in workflow — it might derail a critical study, or compromise months of irreplaceable data. What once could be managed with a clipboard and a yearly checkup now demands predictive analytics, real-time monitoring, and nuanced human collaboration.

In this conversation, Mark walks us through the transformation of lab management from a reactive, hands-on discipline to a proactive, data-visualized environment. He shares how labs have evolved into high-stakes shared spaces, where understanding the difference between “in use” and “almost in use” can save thousands in misallocated resources. And he introduces a powerful metaphor: imagine your lab like an airport — every machine, every process, flagged in real time for risk, readiness, and repair. With modern visualization tools, scientists can now “see” their lab the way pilots see the runway: with full confidence that the systems behind them are working exactly as they should.

This is a conversation about trust. It’s about sitting down with scientists and saying: we’re not here to take your tools — we’re here to make sure they work when you need them. Mark shares stories about the art of change management exemplified by doing one radical thing: listening. Because at the end of the day, innovation isn’t just about the equipment. It’s about people. And the best technology is the kind that frees people up to do what they do best.

Links & Notes

• Connect with Mark on LinkedIn
• 🔍 Want to see your lab like never before? Discover how Hopara’s digital visualization tools turn complex facility data into real-time clarity — so your science never skips a beat. Learn more ➝

In 1996, Ben Shneiderman wrote a paper without a single data table. No graphs. No study participants. Just an idea. And in it a line, repeated ten times, like a mantra. That idea changed how we see much of our digital space.

This week on Seeing Beyond the Dashboard, Pete Wright sits down with Ben, the father of direct manipulation and one of the minds behind the blue hyperlink. You know, the one you’ve clicked a million times. Together, they retrace the evolution of user empowerment through design, from early command lines to Google Maps and the treemap visualizations that turned markets into rectangles. Ben’s famous framework—“Overview first, zoom and filter, then details on demand”—wasn’t just a guideline. It was a philosophy. A lens through which data became human.

But what happens when your ideas win? When every software company starts parroting your mantra? Ben wrestles with that, too, venturing into the murky waters of AI hallucinations, human responsibility, and what it means to remain optimistic in a world where the machines keep getting louder. This is a conversation about the thrill of discovery and the beauty of a well-designed interface.

Links & Notes

• Ben Shneiderman’s book: Human-Centered AI
• "The Eyes Have It: A Task by Data Type Taxonomy for Information Visualizations" by Ben Shneiderman
• Learn more about Hopara's Real-Time Data Visualization Platform

Imagine a world drowning—not in water, but in data. A relentless flood of information, pouring in from IoT devices, enterprise systems, sprawling data lakes. And in this world, the tools we use to navigate—dashboards, tables, static reports—are brittle rafts, barely keeping us afloat.

Now, imagine something different. A system not of numbers and charts, but of landscapes. A way of seeing, navigating, zooming—not unlike the way we explore the world itself.

Dr. Michael Stonebraker doesn’t just imagine this world. He’s building it.

Michael has spent a lifetime shaping how we think about data. A Turing Award-winning computer scientist, he helped define the very foundations of modern databases. But today, he’s here to talk about something else: a fundamental shift in how we access and visualize information.

In this episode, Pete Wright sits down with Mike to explore Hopara—the tool that might just change how we see data forever. They talk about factories in Brazil, the hidden language of vibration sensors, and why Google Maps might hold the secret to understanding a chaotic world. They discuss the peculiar habits of EKG machines, the logistical ballet of John Deere combines, and why hospitals can be some of the slowest adopters of life-saving technology. And they confront the elephant in the server room: the real reason data remains such an untamed beast in the enterprise.

If you think data visualization is about prettier charts, think again. This is about something much bigger.

Links & Notes

• Hopara.io
• Dr. Michael Stonebraker’s Work