Data foundry: a data infrastructure for design research

When designing intelligent interactive products, when researching user behavior and choices, when investigating the interplay of design and the Everyday, we are in need of data. Traditionally, data in design has been scarce. It was collected either in highly qualitative forms or the means to scale were lacking. Data, if it is collected at all, is silo’ed, that means, it is stored and processed in proprietary ways that are not open to other designers and a community of design students, educators and researchers.
With data foundry, we aim to change this. We want to scale up data collection and processing, we want to make it extremely easy to connect to various data sources and combine all data into a common format that encourages new forms of design research, mashing up and creative inquiry beyond the low-scale qualitative.