Data justice made tangible, spatial, and actionable : An exploration of everyday data fairness through game making




Tedeschi, Miriam; Gkouskos, Dimitrios; Resmini, Andrea

PublisherSage

2025

 Human geography

1942-7786

2633-674X

DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1177/19427786251396639

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/19427786251396639

https://research.utu.fi/converis/portal/detail/Publication/505076825



Data justice is negotiated and performed in everyday micro-actions and spatial settings. Yet it is hard to visualise, unpack and,thus, act upon, as its spatial and actionable characteristics remain hidden: everyday actions tend to be carried out automat-ically, and their data dimension remains, in most cases, not tangible and seemingly not operable. This article explores howdata (in)justice can be made tangible, spatial, actionable and safely experimented with through tabletop game making and pro-totyping. The data was collected in a class setting within the Design Games Framework (DGF), a structure where researchparticipants, first, write daily diaries describing their everyday socio-spatial contexts and, second, prototype a tabletop gamereworking existing board games through the relevant topics emerging from the diaries. Results show how the process ofdesigning games to explore data justice discourses and ethical dilemmas, such as fairness and transparency on the use ofdata, or data privacy, enhances actionability over data by making it tangible and spatial.


This work was supported by the Research Council of Finland with the project ‘Justice in Digital Spaces’ (JuDiCe) (decision number 348559) and the project ‘Agency in everyday Datafication’ (AgenDa) (decision number 368166).


Last updated on 01/12/2025 12:18:49 PM