Parallels, Tangents, and Loops: Reflections on the ‘Through’ Part of RtD

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While attention in Research Through Design (RtD) is often on the findings, in this pictorial, we choose to attend to the ‘through’ part of RtD in order to reveal the messy stories of how those insights were arrived at—stories that are often untold, truncated, or streamlined. We use a yearlong RtD project on human-data entanglements in the home as a case study to explore the contours of this process. We detail how our messy lines of inquiry crossed, dead ended, wove together, and looped. Grounded in illustrations of lines, we offer practical reflections on experiences we encountered while navigating these scribbly lines.