Speculative Data Work & Dashboards: Designing Alternative Data Visions

This paper studies data work in an organizational context, and suggests speculative data work as a useful concept and the speculative dashboard as a design artefact, to better understand and support cooperative work. Drawing on fieldwork in a Danish public sector organisation, the paper identifies and conceptualizes the speculative data work performed around processes of digitalization and the push to become data-driven. The speculative dashboard is proposed as a potential design artefact, using practices from speculative design and research to facilitate speculation about data–its sources, visualizations, practices and infrastructures. It does so by hacking the ‘genre’ of the business intelligence data dashboard, and using it as a framework for the juxtaposition of different kinds of data, facilitating and encouraging speculation on alternative visions for data types and use. The paper contributes an empirical study of organizational use of and attitudes towards data, informing a novel design method and potential artefact for co-speculating on alternative visions of and for organizational data.