Abstract
This paper critically examines how contemporary data design logics reframe everyday objects and services as active instruments of measurement and knowledge production. Through a pedagogical experiment in [place name withheld] Square, we explore how student-designed data instruments capture ambiguous, affective, and more-than-human aspects of experience that conventional instrumentation obscures. Drawing on Barad’s agential realism and Lupi’s Data Humanism, our iterative approach reveals that artifacts co-constitute what becomes knowable, making visible the entanglement of bodies, materials, and environments in data production. As students encountered material resistance, breakdown, and multispecies interaction, they developed “instrumental consciousness,” recognising artifact agency and their own complicity in datafication. We argue that enabling designers to make and deploy instruments transforms abstract critiques of data economies into tangible, ethical encounters, fundamentally shifting design responsibility. This work repositions making-as-research as a critical method for interrogating how instruments shape experience, participation, and exclusion in data-driven environments.
Keywords
critical data pedagogy, data instrument, making-as-research, embodied data interaction
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.891
Citation
Bazlamit, R., Dunbar, M., and Speed, C. (2026) Everything is an Instrument: Making Data Instruments as Critical Pedagogy, in Simeone, L., Gray, C. M., Verhoeven, A., de Götzen, A., Bakırlıoğlu, Y., Zohar, H., Stead, M., and Buwert, P. (eds.), DRS2026: Edinburgh, 8–12 June, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.891
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Included in
Everything is an Instrument: Making Data Instruments as Critical Pedagogy
This paper critically examines how contemporary data design logics reframe everyday objects and services as active instruments of measurement and knowledge production. Through a pedagogical experiment in [place name withheld] Square, we explore how student-designed data instruments capture ambiguous, affective, and more-than-human aspects of experience that conventional instrumentation obscures. Drawing on Barad’s agential realism and Lupi’s Data Humanism, our iterative approach reveals that artifacts co-constitute what becomes knowable, making visible the entanglement of bodies, materials, and environments in data production. As students encountered material resistance, breakdown, and multispecies interaction, they developed “instrumental consciousness,” recognising artifact agency and their own complicity in datafication. We argue that enabling designers to make and deploy instruments transforms abstract critiques of data economies into tangible, ethical encounters, fundamentally shifting design responsibility. This work repositions making-as-research as a critical method for interrogating how instruments shape experience, participation, and exclusion in data-driven environments.