Since last August I’ve been an artist in residence on the interdisciplinary research project Data Stories, which aims to map housing and property data and data practices in Dublin and Ireland. The project is funded by a European Research Council grant and based in Maynooth University Social Sciences Institute.
One of the case studies I’ve been working on, together with researcher Dr Carla Kayanan, looked at the rollout of the Housing Need Demand Assessment (HNDA) tool. Some of the issues that came up around the HNDA during the interview phase seemed to be present more broadly in the data ecosystem, for example a lack of clarity and criticality around what counts as evidence and the different kinds of knowledge that are used to interpret and make meaning of evidence for policy making. Earlier this yer we designed and led a series of workshops to continue to explore these issues with a broader group of stakeholders, primarly from within government, in a more interactive way.
You can read more about the workshops, and our reflections on the potential and challenges of these kinds of collaborative, interdisciplinary approaches to research, in this blog post on the Data Stories website.