graphic design &
visual communication

Excavating Data

What 20 Years of Data Entries Tell Us About Individuals, Systems, and Organizations

Presentation by Pas de Chocolat (Cara Oba, Kyle Oba) for EPIC: Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference 2018
Project team: Cara Oba, Kyle Oba, Alicia Dornadic, Jill Misawa

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“An exploration of an organization’s use of technology through data visualizations to understand and communicate our collective assumptions about data and data systems.

Participant-observation, semi-structured interviews and review of process artifacts at many levels of our client’s organization served as our starting point for this exploration. We sought to understand current contexts of work and how policies and practices have changed over time. We mapped roles and relationships between individuals, divisions, facilities and data systems that support primary operations. These data systems were inclusive of paper systems, ad-hoc spreadsheets, and formalized databases.

Looking at data systems from multiple vantage points, what does it mean to track a single person across systems? What do we see in aggregate? What do the comparisons reveal?”

(Pas de Chocolat, 2018)

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© MMXXI Jill Misawa / Designer, LLC