Designing a Data Commons for Cooperative Consultancy

While societal challenges from environmental to health and social issues are ever-increasing, we have to find ways of giving residents, social initiatives, and collectives a greater role in the research, design, and decision-making relating to the city. The Data-Centric Design lab develops tools and methods that make data central in participatory research and design processes. We work with Design & Publics to explore this question with the collective ‘Happy Socks’, Rotterdam’s Afrikaanderwijk and Vreewijk Cooperatives. In this context, data commons, a term that has yet to emerge, can be a shared set of data put collectively together to address challenges that directly impact people involved in its formation. Such data common could be an effective tool for communities to collect and extract insights from data.

In this project, you will design the Minimum-Viable Product of a data commons by leveraging the experience of the Happy Socks collective and testing your design in a context chosen by the collective. Data donation, participatory data analysis, and co-creation of solutions, the design of your data common should put data on the central stage of a collaboration process, creating new partnerships between residents, researchers, governmental bodies, and companies.

You are an IPD or DfI student with experience in designing digital platforms. You are passionate about data and the collaborative use of information. You speak Dutch and look forward to interacting with a rich set of community-led project actors. You are ready to explore the frontier of data privacy and envision radically new ways to conduct research and policy-making.