Humanising Data Through Emotional Design

#letsgetemotional as part of our World Design Organization #WIDD2024 series, the Design team at CivicDataLab conducted a fun and immersive exercise - Humanising Data through Emotional Design for the whole 30 member team. Apart from designers our team includes data and development engineers and social science researchers.?

1. The workshop engaged the non-design team-members in our organisation to capture the ways in which different perspectives can help enhance humanising data. We looked at ways to disseminate information beyond data dashboards, platforms, websites, web and mobile based applications. We discussed non-conventional approaches to break the barriers for data dissemination as we believe that design, especially emotional design, is not limited to designers.
2. We looked at two critical initiatives of CivicDataLab – Public Finance, where we discussed how to make budget data comprehensible and Climate Action, where we looked at strengthening data-driven disaster resilience. The team was unanimous in recognising the fact that both these ecosystems are complex, where data or information dissemination is tedious. Hence, the need for emotional design and designers plays a crucial role to humanise and make data and information accessible for a wider audience.?
3. The team was prompted to suggest ways in which they feel people relate to information or data in their daily lives. The ideas shared looked at making data relatable in different contexts like regional, cultural, behavioural and professional. This highlighted the need of localisation and people-centric aspects of information and data.?
4. Some fun and effective ways to strengthen and design for increased participation of people in the data ecosystem emerged during the course of our 60 minute exercise. These included people and their sources of engagements with information or data and designing public spaces for these conversations. Spaces cited included taking advantage of local stores, bazaars and street kiosks individuals visit, the media we consume to the transport we use – where dialogue and information is shared.

#design4abetterworld combined with #data4publicgood helped us gain inputs through this workshop that will enable us to further strengthen humanising data through emotional design.?

At CivicDataLab, we work at the intersection of data, technology, design and social science to strengthen access to public information, evidence-based decision-making and citizen participation in governance. CivicDataLab harnesses the potential of open knowledge movements to strengthen the data-for-public-good ecosystem and enable citizens to engage in matters of public reform.?

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#wdo#humanisingdata #OpenData #CivicDataLab #PeopleCentricDesign#letsgetemotional

Nupura Gawde Abhinandita Mohapatra Aparna R. Sumit Baruah Prateek Draik Moyna Manku World Design Organization