While Google's mission is to organize the world's information, this information needs to made understandable and usable. We hear a lot about data, and worse, “big data,” but far too little about its meaning and how to make it approachable for the people who need to use it. The solution is to treat data as a design problem, where it can be addressed by starting with end users and working back to the data in all its messy complexity. We can only make progress if we first consider audience and context, forcing us to reformulate the questions at hand and to reconsider the technical decisions and approaches made behind the scenes.