Arundathi Rajan
Conceived in collaboration with Science Gallery Bengaluru for its initial iteration as part of the Sci560 exhibition, this contribution explores the “Daily Data Project”—a workshop designed to engage participants in discourse around creating data visualisations using everyday household objects. Since its inception, the workshop has been conducted four times across Bangalore and Chennai. While the first session was hosted by the Science Gallery, subsequent iterations were independently organised, with the workshop’s structure and methodology iteratively modified based on participant feedback from each session.
This approach seeks to understand the importance and necessity of personal data stories and how they might contribute to research at the intersection of data and design. To facilitate this, the workshop introduces a 54-card toolkit designed for participants to explore “thing-power” materialism, examining how ordinary objects possess the capacity to move and affect humans. Human-created interpretations and machine-created interpretations of data differ, these differences can be productive and that misinterpretations (and mis-remembrances) are important phases in how people create and share the narratives of their lives. The Daily Data Project intends to bring these narratives to the forefront.
At the workshop, participants encounter a range of these objects, items one would typically find in their homes but now presented in isolated contexts, placed alongside other objects not usually seen together. Following a warm-up session of introductions and a critique of traditional data visualisations, participants are asked to engage in a collaborative data collection experiment centred on the one commonality shared by everyone in the room: “How did you reach the workshop venue?”
Primary variables such as mode of transport, monetary cost, departure location, and age are tabulated through a group exercise. This shared dataset then becomes the starting point for participants to explore additional patterns in transit behaviours. Questions like “How many people prefer asking a stranger for directions over using Google Maps?” or “How many listen to music while traveling?” begin to surface, allowing for deep personal reflection through a shared experience.
Using these collected datasets, participants construct tangible data visualisations, and the workshop concludes with reflections on the making process and the learnings derived from their physical outputs. Ultimately, this contribution offers a reflection on the collective insights gained from conducting these four workshop iterations, identifying its specific contributions to the field of information design and presenting the future scope of study for researchers and practitioners in the domain.
Keywords: Data workshop, Tangible data visualisation, Data physicalization, Design toolkit