The DATAGOVlab
Biometrics, digital IDs, health tech, education platforms: regulatory data infrastructures govern our lives while staying abstract and out of sight. The DATAGOVlab makes them tangible. Through infrastructural inversion, a deliberate switch of perspective, we refuse to take everyday infrastructure for granted and bring its backstage work to the front.
The lab is a situation-based laboratory for transformations. Here, participants are co-investigators, not subjects. They meet experts and decision-makers on equal footing, and their lived experience counts as knowledge: legitimate, authoritative, and consequential for how data infrastructures are governed.
It is also a place to experiment with democratic futures. Participants imagine and prototype alternative socio-technical arrangements, while the lab exposes the inequalities that infrastructures carry: exclusion, bias, discrimination, sovereignty. A play-based approach runs throughout. Board games, commissioned artworks, and infrastructure walks turn complex, intangible systems into something you can handle, argue with, and reimagine.
The methods we develop are shared openly, as blueprints for others.
Goals
- Create a place where participants/collaborators can engage, experiment with, contest, and re-imagine regulatory data infrastructures (RDI), where they meet decision-makers in conversation.
- To raise awareness and gather qualitative research data.
- To develop and experiment with innovative participatory methods.
Mission
The DATAGOVlab makes governance by data infrastructure tangible. Regulatory data systems (e.g. biometrics, digital IDs, health tech, and education tech), govern our lives and societies while remaining abstract and out of public view. This living lab renders them experiential, accessible, and open to debate. It works through infrastructural inversion: a deliberate gestalt switch that does not take everyday infrastructure for granted but foregrounds the backstage work through which it operates.
The DATAGOVlab is a situation-based laboratory for transformations. Here, participants/collaborators are co-investigators, meeting experts and other stakeholders for mutual learning in a safe space/situation where everyone can critically engage with the infrastructures that shape their lives. This foregrounds their lived experience, and works to establish participant-generated, experiential knowledge as legitimate and authoritative, on equal footing with institutional and technical expertise in decisions about governance by data infrastructure.
The lab is a place to experiment with democratic futures. Participants/collaborators collectively imagine and prototype alternative socio-technical arrangements, while the lab exposes and contests the inequalities embedded in data infrastructures: exclusion, bias, discrimination, and questions of sovereignty. A play-based approach runs throughout, where first-hand experience and leisure make complex, intangible issues accessible to a broad public and cultivate literacy, agency, and collective capacity.
The DATAGOVlab bridges research, policy, and public life. It fosters dialogue among the full range of stakeholders: participants/collaborators, scholars, technologists, and decision-makers. It openly shares the participatory methods it develops as reusable blueprints for critical data studies and civic engagement elsewhere. Its methods are grounded in community-based participatory and arts-based traditions, which create space for authentic engagement and allow multiple stories to emerge. As an interdisciplinary environment, it also opens onto dialogue across paradigms, including between qualitative and quantitative approaches.
Methods
Interactive Art
Artworks commissioned from artists and artist collectives that make apparent and “translate” the functioning of technical components, notably data transfer, drawn from different case studies. By rendering complex technology palatable and inviting multiple ways of looking, they open space for fundamental reflection and offer participants/collaborators an occasion for open-ended, playful exploration.
Playable Citizen Science
Case-based board games and blueprints for embodied experiences that center first-person engagement in a safe space/situation for literacy promotion. Built on plausible scenarios and prototypes, roleplay games expose players to the decision-making dynamics of regulatory data infrastructures and invite them to generate new ideas.
Infrastructure Walking
Infrastructure ethnography conducted as a walkthrough or walking tour, combinable with participatory documentary or photovoice where participants/collaborators wish. It lets the living lab document and archive qualitative data for research while contributing to the dissemination of results.