Flying with data: Openness, forms and understanding

There is a concerted effort to make available large amounts of public and open data. This paper explores this much-vaulted idea in terms of how easy or difficult it might be to find and access this data, and how a non-specialist audience is able to read, comprehend and make sense of complex digital data in its conventional form. Following a discussion that introduces the concept of the datadriven physical object (the data-object), and the current issues pertaining to the access and use of open data, the paper traces the journey of two design researchers through the activity of locating and using publicly available healthcare statistics as source content for developing this new form of data interpretation. The documented ‘dataseeds’ case study suggests that making data publically available is only the first step in thinking about how digital data can be accessed and shared in meaningful ways by a range of different audiences.