Our story

A short history of looking closely.

SIOL began as a notebook habit: sketch the thing, measure the thing, and only then try to explain it.

The first field notes were not about data at all. They were about a romanesco broccoli on a kitchen table, drawn badly, measured carefully, and annotated until the repeating structure became obvious. Each cone contained smaller cones, which contained smaller cones again.

That habit — observe, measure, then explain — turned out to work just as well on datasets as on vegetables. The patterns were already there. What was missing were tools patient enough to describe them.

Complexity from simple rules.

Field note 001

What we are building

SIOL is the version of that notebook that scales: a place to catalogue observations, measure structure at several scales at once, and keep the trail back to the raw data intact.

We are a small team of researchers, engineers and designers, and we still draw things badly before we model them.