About us

The Data & Design Group is an interdisciplinary research group in the Department of Information Science at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Mission

We study technology and society by making things. Design is both our method for understanding problems and our medium for proposing alternatives.

The artifacts we create—tools, systems, frameworks—aren't just outputs of research; they embody ideas about how technology could work differently.

Vision

We are working toward a world where everyone has power to shape the design of systems that affect their social and political lives.

How we work

• Critique should take material form. Identifying problems isn't enough—we have to articulate alternatives through the work itself. For us, building software is a form of inquiry: prototypes help us and our collaborators learn together, not just solve predefined problems.
• We build in order to understand, in partnership with the people our work is meant to serve. We partner with disabled people, refusers, and others who have historically been designed for rather than with, as collaborators who shape the direction of research.
• We shift power by shifting who designs. When people are left out of design, the resulting systems tend to serve someone else's interests. Our research responds to this by shifting who participates in design and what gets made.