An independent New York City data and design studio turning complex public records into clear interactive stories, civic tools, and custom web applications.
“When housing costs shift in a neighborhood, or a twenty-year local institution closes its doors, you feel it on the street long before it registers in a quarterly economic briefing.”
Every time a restaurant passes a health inspection, a builder files a permit, a commuter docks a Citi Bike, or the City Council moves a billion dollars between agencies, it leaves a line item in a public database. The problem is that those records usually sit inside massive government tables nobody has the time to clean, or dry institutional PDFs written for people looking at the city from a boardroom.
I started DIV Labs Studio in Brooklyn to close that gap. I’ve spent over fifteen years working in operations, engineering, and enterprise analytics—building data pipelines, leading teams, and translating complex operational and municipal datasets into clear strategic decisions.
But when I step away from my desk, I’m living the city at street level: riding my bike up the avenues with my son in the back seat, waiting on the Q train platform, debating with friends over which 90s Brooklyn or Queensbridge rap verse got sampled the most, and watching neighborhood storefronts on our block change hands.
Whether you’re a renter trying to see where your paycheck still works, a small business owner weighing a five-year lease, or a fan tracing forty years of hip-hop history, you shouldn’t need to know Python or SQL to see the whole picture.
We operate an agile studio model designed for the modern computational era. Barney Charles personally directs every analysis, writes every production pipeline, and architects every visual story.
Traditional data visualization agencies rely on heavy layers of account managers, junior researchers, sub-contracted designers, and endless discovery meetings that dilute the core analytical thesis and bloat client budgets.
By pairing fifteen years of engineering and enterprise analytics rigor with cutting-edge autonomous coding agents and deterministic data pipelines, DIV Labs matches the analytical throughput and software velocity of a traditional 12-person agency—with zero junior handoffs and zero overhead waste.
Every client commission, civic tool, and municipal research report is held to institutional standards of statistical integrity, delivered in days and weeks rather than fiscal quarters.
Direct communication with the principal engineer building your data pipelines and user interface. No intermediaries or lost-in-translation briefs.
Every data schema, DuckDB query, MapLibre layer, and editorial annotation is personally engineered and reviewed by Barney Charles.
Moving from raw municipal datasets (PLUTO, OpenData, GBFS) to interactive scrollytelling prototypes in days instead of months.
We believe civic data tools and editorial labs must hold themselves to the highest standards of transparency, algorithmic ethics, and reproducibility.
100% of municipal records, budget ledgers, and transit feeds are transformed via deterministic Python, DuckDB, and SQL pipelines with zero hallucinations or unverified approximations.
Human editorial oversight guides every thesis. Data is paired with domain voices, local historians, and field notes from real New Yorkers living the reality on their blocks.
LLMs assist in rapid software scaffolding, exploratory parsing of massive unstructured text archives (e.g. lyrics corpus), and prototyping. All outputs are strictly verified against primary records.
Every Lab publishes its data sources, methodology notes, and known data limitations. We welcome independent audits, peer critiques, and collaborative updates via hello@divlabs.studio.
We operate across three core tracks: client commissions, custom market viability research, and self-directed civic tools.
Modern tooling and AI let our studio clean millions of rows of messy records in days instead of months. But a database has never signed a restaurant lease, negotiated a zoning variance, or stood in a recording booth in 1994. Numbers tell you what happened; people who live the work tell you why. Alongside our data pipelines, we invite practitioners, industry advocates, and scholars to pressure-test our Labs and contribute credited field notes.
Are you an urban planner, hospitality operator, housing advocate, or cultural historian? Review an upcoming Lab or submit field notes for full credit and backlinks.
Contribute Domain Insight →For civic groups, media newsrooms, and organizations sitting on vital data. We turn dense research or internal records into guided scrollytelling investigations and interactive maps people actually want to use.
Evaluating a new restaurant, retail storefront, or neighborhood expansion? Share your operating concept, spatial requirements, and target budget. We analyze multi-year business survival rates, category saturation, and transit-driven foot-traffic proxies to support confident site selection.
Alongside our research and client work, we maintain free, open-access civic calculators and decision sandboxes for everyday New Yorkers—like our 4-polygon Neighborhood Finder, Citi Bike commute analyzer, and municipal budget tax receipt.
We collaborate with civic institutions, newsrooms, real estate developers, and corporate innovators to create high-impact interactive stories and decision software.