Datastorming: Crafting Data into Design Materials for Design Students’ Creative Data Literacy

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With the wave of data-driven design, data literacy is increasingly important for designers, so current design education aims to incorporate data literacy. However, designing with data can be challenging to design students as it might appear more abstract than tangible. In this research, we explore how design students could build creative data literacy by materializing data into tangible card formats, to inform their ideation process. We developed a method called Datastorming for design students to learn to create new design concepts using various data sets. Datastorming was tested in a university’s service design course with 23 undergraduate students. Results show that Datastorming helped the students physically interact with various data sets to create meaningful connections and contextualize data for possible use scenarios. We discuss how Datastorming supports the designerly way of using data and helps students build creative data literacy for their design work.