The Marios and Luigis of design: Design plumbers wanted!

Designers increasingly need to collect data to design personalized, contextualized experiences. The act of collecting such data - often in context - is hard, and collecting the right quality and quantity data is even harder. By applying approaches such as Data-Enabled Design (DED) we can remotely collect data. The DED process involves operational, behind-the-scenes activities to facilitate and scale data collection and designing with data. These activities show similar characteristics to plumbing, channeling the flow of data in design. In this provocation, we describe six main "design plumbing'' tasks throughout three main phases of a DED study that are seemingly out of scope for design, yet crucial to design. We posit that knowing about the pipes and drains of your design process is as essential as concepts, prototypes and qualitative studies are.