Earlier this month, Danielle and Sam travelled to Lisbon to attend the Digital Geographies conference. This was the fourth edition of Digital Geographies, and the theme for 2025 was ‘Artificial Geographies: opening the black box for a new wave of critical thinking’. The conference examined the ways digital technologies are reshaping territories, and the implications and challenges of this for governance, inequality and more.

 Image: the conference opening panel of Yanliu Lin, Chun Yang, Dylan Brady, Mario Vale (chair) and Paulo Morgado

Danielle and Sam organised a session titled ‘Data Voids: Understanding Digital Geographies of the Built Environment through Negativity and Refusal’. You can read the full call for papers here. The session was generative and sparked discussions across a range of fields, with presentations from Shahriar Khonsari and Lin Zhang. Khonsari examined silences and absences in the system, conceiving of them not as gaps or errors, but as voids that are actively produced for different reasons. Looking at the context of Iran, Khonsari argued that, on the one hand, the state uses invisibility as a weapon to delegitimise marginal communities, and that, on the other hand, citizens actively erase themselves to survive. Khonsari looked at the example of informal settlements in Iran, and spoke of the act of building an illegal home as committing an act of data refusal through creating a data void.

Lin Zhang discussed initial findings from the UKRI/ERC-funded GENERATE project, led by Prof. Saska Petrova. The project aims to offer original insights into the social, spatial, and political inequalities that drive energy related injustices, and struggles linked to the growth of new low-carbon energy production in disadvantaged regions and communities. Zhang applied the ideas of data feminism (a way of thinking about data, both their uses and their limits, that is informed by direct experience, by a commitment to action, and by intersectional feminist thought) to both survey and critique existing quantitative research into energy poverty.

In their own presentation, Danielle and Sam examined the potentialities and possible contradictions of bringing together ideas of critical refusal and negative geographies, articulating these concepts through examples drawn from the Data Stories project. Firstly, they discussed the relationships between data and the politics of land and property, considering how attempting to grasp the world through data always also means contending with absences of various kinds. Secondly, they proposed critical refusal as a tool and practice which holds promise in responding to data harms, with capacity to shape the production of existing and possible alternative trajectories.Image: Danielle Hynes and Samuel Mutter present “Half the houses built don’t exist”: Questions of absence and refusal in the case of Irish housing, planning and property data at Digital Geographies

Danielle and Sam concluded that, while the two concepts have divergent foci, there is value in considering negative geographies together with refusal. Where negative geographies invites researchers to stay with absences, gaps, voids and shadows, resisting the impulse to quickly resolve them, one key aspect of critical refusal is its generative potential. As such, it was proposed that, in the spaces of negative geography, areas for refusal may emerge.

They closed with a series of questions which remain open-ended: Could the framing of negative geographies attune us to imagining systems that could build on or even expand existing absences in ways that lead to more just alternatives? Could this assist us in avoiding what, in the context of prison and police abolitionism, is widely referred to as ‘reformist reforms’ (those that add money, power or resources to the prison-industrial-complex)? But, at the same time, does bringing critical refusal into conversation with negative geography contradict or undercut its core tenets?

We thank the conference organisers for their work and our session presenters and participants for their thoughtful engagement.

The Data Stories team was involved in two events during the Maynooth University Research Week.  

Maynooth Sparks 2025: Celebrating Early Career Research  

This year’s Research Week featured Maynooth Sparks 2025, an inspiring event bringing together the university’s early career research community on Tuesday 21st October.   

Behind the scenes, Maynooth postdoc liaison Juliette Davret worked closely with the event organisers, especially Noreen Lacey (from the Research Development Office – RDO), to coordinate the event. Juliette helped shape the panel discussion, bringing in Rob Kitchin to share his perspective on ERC funding and supervising a research team.

The morning began with a series of 6-minute talks in which postdocs showcased diverse research, from energy justice and cosmology simulations to language models and healthcare innovation.  

The following panel discussion on “Funding opportunities & building research teams” was facilitated by Patrick Boyle (RDO) and featured expert insights from the following speakers:

• Eilish Lynch on career pathways
• Dr Abeer Eshra and Dr Niamh Wycherley on Research Ireland Pathway Experiences  
• Dr Guilia Gaggioni on Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellowships  
• Prof Rob Kitchin on ERC funding and the supervisor’s perspective

The talks emphasised the importance of tailoring grant application to align with what the specific funder values, clearly articulating the intellectual contribution, feasibility and broader impact of the idea. A strong proposal not only presets a solid concept but also communicates its significance and potential payoff in accessible, compelling terms.  

The event concluded with a networking lunch, allowing researchers to connect with colleagues and RDO staff – the perfect end to a morning of knowledge sharing and community building!  

Daft.ie for Noobs: Gaming Ireland’s property market by spoofing property websites 

On the Thursday of Research Week, members of the Data Stories team hosted a 1-hour interactive workshop titled Daft.ie for Noobs: Gaming Ireland’s Property Market by Spoofing Property Websites. The talk was informed by the work of Oliver Dawkins, Ella Harris, Carla Maria Kayanan and Hannah Mumby who are working on a research project called ‘Commodity Narratives’. The event offered a behind-the-scenes look at how this team of creatives and researchers have been collaborating to interrogate the following themes in relation to the housing crisis in Ireland: a) the commodification of housing, b) the role of capitalism in shaping housing desires (and futures), and c) the use of digital games as a medium testing assumptions and gaining better understanding of peoples lived experiences.  

Prior to the workshop, the team sent a survey to participants inquiring into their personal housing journeys. Answers provided insight into frustrations that people deal with when navigating housing in Ireland. These insights also serve to inform the iterative process of website and game development and help to ensure that the work we produce is meaningful and relevant to an Irish audience. 

Example question: What (if anything) feels absurd about navigating housing in Ireland?  

The aim of the workshop was twofold. We wanted to introduce the work to the Maynooth University community, but we also hoped to test our work in progress to receive feedback. Starting with a short presentation, the team described how creative experiments — from data scraping to gamified website prototypes — seek to expose the absurdities embedded the property market and the logics that underpin it. Following the introduction, Olly showcased early technical experiments underpinning the spoof property site which is modelled on familiar sites like Daft.ie and MyHome.ie.

Participants were then invited to interact with our website, which was embedded with games and various hidden Easter eggs to find which satirise different aspects of Ireland’s property market. Links to pages which dump you on the Craigslist for shared rooms are just one example, mirroring the bitter experience of many student renters who are unable to secure more private accommodation. 

The work is still in progress; including the research informing the webpage, design coherence and mechanics. We hope to deliver a website that sufficiently mirrors popular property websites in Ireland but that the user journey is slightly off, surprising and ultimately jarring so as to provoke reflection on the commodification of housing.

Of course, we also want site visitors to enjoy the satire and have fun! 

To learn more about the early stages of the Commodity Narratives case study and the iterative creative process, visit the Data Stories website previous post: How do commodity narratives influence housing desires and life journeys?

 

On 17th October 2025, Juliette Davret, Helen Shaw and Carla Maria Kayanan hosted a workshop in Dublin entitled Collaborative Urban Planning with Data, organised as part of the Data Stories project (phase 2). Helen Shaw (artist in residence within Data Stories project for 2025) led the workshop, with Eimear McNally (graphic visual reporter) supporting her. 

The purpose of the case study was to investigate how data informed the City Edge strategic framework and implementation. Following a site visit, 16 stakeholder interviews, desk-based research and an analysis of 37 datasets, the City Edge case study team invited past and present stakeholders involved in the design and implementation of City Edge to a workshop where we could share findings, explore how data shapes urban planning and discuss how we can work better together to plan our cities.

What is City Edge?  

City Edge is a strategic planning project for an area between Dublin City Council and South Dublin City Council. Like many urban planning projects, it involves multiple stakeholders: local authorities, consultants and state agencies. Our research team has been studying how data is collected, shared and use throughout this planning process. 

The video below, which was used by Helen to open the workshop, provides an overview of the challenges and opportunities of the site. 

Findings from our research (to date)  

The research revealed four critical challenges around data governance and the use of data for urban planning in Ireland:  

1. Data standardisation: Stakeholders use different formats to collect information. This challenges data sharing and creates delays in the planning process. Without a common approach to data governance, it is difficult to plan an integrated urban project.
2. Data reliability:  Many stakeholders told the researchers that they struggle to access accurate, up-to-date information. Some datasets disappear entirely, while others are difficult to obtain (e.g. additional fee charge). These situations can also hinder the successful roll out of a project, whether it is in the beginning during the fact-finding stage or nearer to the implementation stage.
3. Data gaps: Key datasets are often incomplete or outdated. Information about tree canopy coverage, habitat mapping, hedgerow data and landscape character assessments is missing or poorly maintained. This finding complements another Data Stories case study (with the CSO), which recently lead to a publication on the property and planning data ecosystem in Ireland. This inconsistency in data reveals that environmental and social values, like biodiversity loss or community well-being, are hard to measure and and/or to integrate into planning models.
4. Data culture: The researchers discovered limited data literacy across public bodies. This highlights the need to invest not only in data systems but also in the people who understand and manage them.

Additionally, the relationship between local authorities and consultants reveals how consultants currently work with data and raises important questions about the relationship between consultants and local authorities and how these relationships can become more collaborative and innovative. While consultants bring valuable expertise in analysis and scenario development, there is value in ensuring some of these exist and are maintained within local planning departments.  

The workshop: Mapping, Designing and Planning  

Helen started the workshop by welcoming all participants and asking individuals to introduce themselves. This was followed by drone footage of the City Edge planning area. Juliette presented a brief overview of research findings, keeping the presentation tightly focused on data culture and governance. Then, Helen facilitated the main workshop activity through the use of a systems analysis tool called Value Network Mapping and the Berkana Two Loops model – a framework for understanding systems in transition – to encourage the discussion.

Participants identified key roles, relationships and challenges in the planning process. Together, they explored what barriers and opportunities exist and envisioned new ways of working together. Throughout the morning, participants shared their experiences and feedback on both the research findings and the collaborative process.  

Eimear McNally, a graphic visual reporter, captured the discussions in real-time, creating a visual record of our conversations.

What happens next?  

The workshop was just the beginning of forthcoming outputs. From a creative perspective, Helen is in the process of conducting one-on-one audio conversations with participants to create a public story about the case study, similar to her previous work on This Is Where We Live. From an academic perspective, the research remains ongoing. We hope to publish further results in the next few months. 

The Data Stories team would like to thank all participants who joined us for this collaborative session.

Does research creation work? This was the framing question for the Data Stories research creation workshop: The use of research creation and arts based methods in studying housing, planning and the built environment. Held on our Maynooth University campus on 9-10 September 2025, the workshop featured 17 paper presentations and two hands-on workshops that allowed participants to see creative methods in action. The answer to the question is not clear cut; it might work in certain situations and not in others. More likely the answer is: “Yes, it works but…” or “Yes, it works and…”. Research creation might flourish within certain parameters and structures, but flounder when proper scaffolding is missing. Ultimately, the purpose of the two-day workshop was to learn from researchers and artists engaged in research creation to theorise the types of situations, parameters and structures that allow the combination of traditional social science methods and arts-based methods to aid people in generating knowledge and insights about the world we inhabit. 

Carla Maria Kayanan opened up the workshop outlining Phase 2 of the Data Stories project and lessons learned to date. She provided a summary of the literature on research creation to guide participants on existing definitions of research creation. Additionally, Carla included a list of questions submitted by the Data Stories team that served as a provocation for reflection throughout the workshop. Responses to these questions will help the Data Stories team theorise the larger, overarching question of whether or not research creation works and under what circumstances. 

Who is research creation for? 

• Are there certain sectors more/less amenable to research creation?
• What is the relationship between the artistic output and contribution to knowledge?
  What do we make in research creation? Does it matter and who does it matter to?

What is the necessary structure for research creation?

• How do we avoid research creation from being extractive?
• How can you fit an arts practice into a research schedule with a pre-defined grant structure?
• What are the biggest institutional barriers to research creation projects and how can we tackle them?

How are the boundaries between the researcher and the artist (un)fruitful, (un)productive and (dis)enabling?

• When is a researcher and artists and an artist a researcher?
• How do we break the academic bubble and bring this kind of work and research to a broader audience?
• In what ways are ‘failure’ and ‘unknowing’ part of the process of research creation
• What would allow, or better support, early career researchers to step off the hamster wheel of paper-writing and presenting and engage more deeply into different research modalities and thinking speeds? 

Session 1 

Martijn de Waal kicked of session 1 with a presentation based on the work he produced with colleagues at the Centre of Expertise Creative Innovation. On the question of whether research creation is research or art, Martin argues that it’s neither. Rather, it is all research, and it all produces insights; a statement that was backed up with examples from projects he worked on. 

Next up was Christina Horvath, who has a decades long history of working on co-creation. Through examples of various projects across the globe, Christina argued that successful co-creation requires researchers to give up power. Equally, Christina asked us to consider if artists and creative outputs are valued for their aesthetics. This is a question that resonated throughout the workshop, particularly when considering need between the artists and the researcher: Does the artist need the researcher in the same way that the research needs the artist? Or might it be, as Christina questioned during the panel session, that researchers are the parasites in such relationships? 

The final presenter for this session was Léa Donguy, who had previously presented with the Data Stories team at the AAG and was subsequently invited to elaborate on her presentation. In addition to holding down a full-time academic position, Léa is the president of a cultural cooperative within Lab’URBA and has spent over 10 years working with artists as a Geography researcher. Léa described the methodological tools she has developed over time to study the physical environment and environmental extraction. 

Session 2 

After a short break, Session 2 started with Meghan Taylor Holtan presenting an autoethnographic account of a mini circus arts residency in Buffalo, New York, animated by efforts to communicate questions and data around the social, economic, political and embodied dimensions of housing energy efficiency. The account demonstrated an unfolding process of inquiry around the possibilities and challenges (creative and critical, but also practical/logistical) of communicating these questions through an integration of Holtan’s background as a circus artist and instructor with more traditional quantitative methods, culminating in a juggling film installation on a net zero energy demonstration home.  

Next, John Bingham-Hall presented work from Staging Ground, a creative residency as part of the research platform Theatrum Mundi. The project brought together professionals (e.g. architects, choreographers and filmmakers) with Paris residents, activists and planners to walk and ‘re-choreograph’ cultures of movement of large transport infrastructures, specifically the metro and Périphérique ring road. The project resulted in the production of works, such as film, which highlighted the human or other mundane lives of these infrastructures. Bingham-Hall reflected on how the co-production of ‘embodied’ research might shape concrete planning processes.    

Giada de Coulon and Frédérique Leresche presented on a participatory film-making project in which groups struggling with precarious living conditions in Switzerland (including women, undocumented migrants, and LGBTQIA+ groups) were given cameras with which to respond to the question of what ‘home’ meant to them. As well as a mode of expression for revealing different experiences of precariousness, potentially countering conventional narratives around what constitutes (a) ‘home’, the creative methods of the project also raised ethical and political questions around representation and aesthetics.   

In the subsequent discussion, participants followed up on matters of ‘translation’ and ‘representation’ raised across the presentations. There was a question posed around whether meaning is lost in the conversion of embodied, participatory work and experience into visual or other representations (such as film or photography). It was also asked whether art (and indeed academic research) ‘speaks for itself’; to what extent or at what point it requires framing or contextualisation for audiences.   

The issue of funding for this kind of knowledge-production was also discussed, including how, under conditions of precarity and ever-decreasing financial support for the arts, the continuous making of work was seen as a necessary means of maintenance, facilitating opportunities for networks, further work, or for tactically accessing small pots of funding.

Session 3 

Cecilie Sachs Olsen began the third session of the workshop with a presentation titled ‘Oh the Drama! Research creation as participatory theatre-based method to accommodate conflict in urban planning’. Cecilie described a process she was part of designing, alongside collaborators, called Drama Labs. These involved bringing together participants who are part of conflicts around urban planning to partake in a form of participatory theatre. Cecilie teased out how the Drama Labs assisted in making conflict productive through examining three elements of the process: estrangement, embodiment and entanglement. 

Next, Oliver Dawkins presented his work supporting the Performance Corporation in their development of a theatre show about housing in Ireland titled Pretty Vacant. Oliver reflected on the process of undertaking research, bringing data into the performance space, preparing a punk song, and performing on stage. Oliver’s discussion explored the convergences and divergences that arise in the creative process and the necessity for different strands of the research development to be gathered up or set aside for the sake of the final output. 

Following Oliver, Ivis Garcia discussed strategies of engaging communities in anti-displacement planning. Ivis recounted the various creative modes used to assist in engaging communities, including putting up posters, sending postcards, hanging signs on doorknobs, and youth engagement with tracing stencils on the pavement. 

Finally, Mel Galley reflected on her work as part of the Data Stories team, working alongside Juliette Davret and a data intermediary company utilising speculative writing. Mel highlighted the benefits of engaging in speculative writing in a research context, including offering a space for ambiguity and playfulness, and the possibility of reflecting on what is occurring in the here and now. 

Session 4 

The first talk in our fourth session was given by Sarah Gelbard, who discussed a series of community-based workshops which used collage and zine making as collaborative methods for identifying better housing outcomes. Designed for vulnerable people with lived experience of housing insecurity and incarceration in Canada, the workshops were prompted by the speculative question ‘What would housing be like in a world without prisons?’. Responding to this prompt, participants were encouraged to move beyond discussion of their own personal experiences to identify more systematic forms of harm affecting them and to propose their own alternatives. An important part of this process for Sarah was recognising the need to compensate participants for their time. 

Danielle Hynes and Samuel Mutter then discussed their collaborative work with Data Stories’ artists in residence Mel Galley and Augustine O’Donoghue. The talk contrasted their use of traditional social science methods with more creative projects involving different writing and communication methods, including zine-making, the use of Excel grids for story composition, posting texts through letterboxes, and the creation of data-informed doormat messages to communicate with door-knocking politicians. The talk also constructively discussed the tensions that can arise between academia, the arts, and their use of data, and the ways in which creative methods might better be employed to mediate their dependencies and improve collaboration. 

In the final talk of this session, Nazanin Karimi discussed her work engaging students in processes of counter-mapping in the Netherlands to help expose, politicise and propose alternative arrangements for a range of housing challenges. In these counter-mappings participants were encouraged to engage different narrative and sensory modalities to inform hand-drawn maps which focus on fluid and dynamic aspects of urban living which are not well captured by more formal approaches to mapping. What this activity uncovered are the many informal adaptations people make to prevalent housing conditions, also intimating how those conditions might be made more favourable.

 

Session 5 

The last session of the workshop included three presentations. Joan Somers Donnelly shared how the success of research creation depends on the level of openness and buy-in from those involved. Comparing two case studies that used arts-based activities during workshop activities, she showed how different contexts either allowed collaboration to flourish or made it much harder to achieve meaningful impact.

Conor Moloney took us into the playful yet staged public spaces of London. Using his background in architecture, he began experimenting with drawing not just as documentation but as a creative way of layering protest, play, and place into cityscape.  

In Dublin’s Liberties, researcher Lidia Manzo  and artists Aoife Ward and Eve Woods  told the story of how their collaborative project uses satire through hotel walking tours to push back against gentrification. Their work highlights how art can question who cares for urban spaces and how communities can resist the loss of culture and identity.

Across this session, a shared theme emerged: artists bring something different yet essential to research, but their contributions are often undervalued and underfunded. Speakers stressed that artists should be part of the process from the very start, and that researchers also need time and space to engage with artistic methods in ways that feel meaningful. Research-creation, as our speakers showed, is not just about new methods, it’s about rethinking how knowledge, community, and creativity can come together to imagine better futures.

Workshops 

Two workshops, one held on each day, were scheduled to allow workshop facilitators to demonstrate the use of arts-based methods in action. The first, facilitated by Agata Gunkova, Madeline Isobel Mesich and Margareta Relijić focused on imagined housing futures. Participants were asked to individually reflect and write down what it meant to integrate care into housing. Split into small groups, participants discussed what a caring housing could look like. Following the discussion, individuals were given a piece of lino and carving tools to sketch and carve a caring housing utopia.  Each of the pieces that the small groups used connected like puzzle pieces to a create a whole. Participants then painted their pieces and stamped them into connected wholes on poster board. The produced outcomes were used to further the discussion on alternative housing futures. 

The second workshop was facilitated by Ella Harris and Mel Nowicki based on previous research on the use of tiny homes in Austin, Texas. The research project led to a Tiny House Boardgame, which Ella and Mel introduced to the group through game play. Players navigated the board as characters, derived from Ella and Mel’s research. Each player had a fixed budget and chance cards that reflected housing experiences and/or setbacks. At the end of the game, players could ‘see’ their tiny housing reality based on the journeys they took, and the material possessions picked up along the way. The latter half of the workshop kept the theme of game play. Participants were given a short amount of time to develop a game based on housing. The game design that each table created was later shared with the group. The experience of creating a game helped participants reflect on the usefulness of games as a research tool.

At the end of the two engaging and insightful days, packed with paper presentations, workshops and shared meals, Rob Kitchin closed the workshop with an overview and summary of lessons learned and questions for further reflection and inquiry. We intend to answer some of these questions and to push the dialogue further through an edited volume theorising research creation. We’ll be sure to let you know when that comes out!

Presentation Slides

• Carla Maria Kayanan – Theoretical Perspectives on Research Creation
• Martijn de Waal – Beyond the Toolkit: The Value of Artistic Research for Societal Challenges
• Christina Horvath – The Potential of Arts-Based Co-Creation to Research he Urban Margins with Communities
• Léa Donguy – How research and art can be intricate in the co-production of spatial knowledge?
• Meghan Taylor Holtan – What “good” is energy efficiency? Circus arts as research method
• John Bingham-Hall – Staging Grounds: can embodied experience act back on the planning of urban infrastructure?
• Giada de Coulon and Frédérique Leresche – Beyond Refuge: Rethinking the Concept of ‘Home’ Through Creative Practices
• Cecilie Sachs Olsen – Oh the drama! Research creation as participatory theatre-based method to accommodate conflict in urban planning
• Oliver Dawkins – Performing research creation: When what you produce is not what you learn
• Ivis Garcia – Thriving in Place: Engaging Communities in Anti-Displacement Planning
• Mel Galley and Juliette Davret – Narrative pathways and defamiliarisation: using speculative fiction for reflection and creative collaboration
• Sarah Gelbard – Collage Co-creation as an abolitionist practice of transformative housing justice
• Danielle Hynes, Samuel Mutter, Mel Galley and Augustine O’Donoghue – Artists-Out-Of-Residence: Opportunities and Constraints to Creating Housing Data Stories through Researcher-Artist Collaboration in Dublin, Ireland
• Nazanin Karimi – Rethinking Housing Justice Through Counter-Mapping
• Joan Somers Donnelly – ‘‘Did you get what you needed?’’ In search of fertile ground for research creation
• Conor Moloney – Spillover! From visual methods to architectural research-creation in ‘Playing the City’
• Lidia Manzo, Aoife Ward and Eve Woods – Satire, Gentrification, and Dissent: Cultivating a City of Care through Arts-Research Collaboration in Dublin’s Liberties
• Madeline Mesich, Margareta Reljić and Agata Guńková – Imagining Alternative Housing Futures (Workshop)
• Ella Harris and Mel Nowicki – Get Smaller! A Game About Journeys to Tiny Living (Workshop)

 

This is the research question guiding the research creation process in Oliver Dawkins, Ella Harris, Carla Maria Kayanan and Hannah Mumby’s Commodity Narratives case study. Over the past six months, we have held a series of conversations and have used various tools to extract meaning out of our shared interests on the topic and to point to directions of inquiry. Continuously, we return to our research question to both ground us and forge our path: How do commodity narratives influence housing desires and life journeys?

As part of this case study, on 17 June, Oliver Dawkins and Carla Maria Kayanan attended the Tiny House Games Workshop at Oxford Brookes University. Carla’s funding was supported by Maynooth’s Department of Geography through her Research Incentivisation Award, Navigating Ireland’s housing challenges: Lessons from gamers. The interactive workshop, which was hosted by Mel Nowiki, Ella Harris and Hannah Mumby, was broken down into two parts. The first half provided an opportunity for attendees to learn about, play and provide feedback on Mel and Ella’s Tiny House board game.

Video credit: Kieno Anderson 

The board game was created as part of a BA/Leverhulme Small grant funded investigation into Tiny Housing in Texas led by Drs Mel Nowicki, Ella Harris and Tim White. It came about when Ella was tasked with creating a diagram for the forthcoming book Reconstructing the American Dream (Intellect Books, 2025). The diagram was meant to illustrate pathways to tiny housing -e.g. the personal and structural choices and events through which people end up ‘going tiny.’ Drawing a static diagram about something with so many complex variables proved challenging, but as Ella worked through it, she realised her sketches had started to look like the board of a game and the team decided to try out game creation as a way of understanding and articulating these multidimensional pathways. The game creation process became a form of data analysis through which the team identified archetypal tiny house dwellers, typifying characteristics of different typologies of tiny housing, themes in life events that lead to tiny living, etc. At the workshop, we tested a beta version of the game that will now be refined to create a creative output that showcases elements of this research.  

The second half of the workshop was focused on experiencing and exploring various forms of game play. Hannah guided the group on an absurd 2.5hr journey that used a variety of different game mechanisms to help participants playfully explore questions about what it means to be human in the modern world, including: the kind of advantages or disadvantages that come from our start in life and how this affects our ability to make choices; how we define success; and how our life journeys relate to social issues around culture and housing. Broadly this whole experience was also an invitation to reflect on how games might be useful in bringing research to life, and making it interactive and engaging for new audiences. The experience involved the following gamified mechanics: 

• Identity construction: Participants began by making an identity card, where they drew a head and shoulders picture of a character that they wanted to embody for the duration of the workshop and gave them a name. This then went into a plastic wallet with a string so that participants could wear this around their neck like an identity card.
• Character attributes/stats: Participants turned over their identity card to see a scoring table on the back. They rolled a die to determine their starting score in the areas of wealth, health, bougieness and financial literacy, and wrote their starting score in the boxes, before collecting coloured plastic tokens for each category according to their score.
• Point scoring / narrative arc: based on their starting score, participants then had access to different cards that represented their ‘formative life choices’ – they could choose one card from a pile and turn it over to see what life choice they had made, and the impact this had on their bank of tokens. E.g. “You wait on a council house waiting list indefinitely: GAIN 1 FINANCIAL LITERACY token, LOSE 1 HEALTH token, LOSE 1 BOUGIENESS token”.
• Wheel of fortune: next, participants came up to the front of the room and spun a wheel of fortune which had 4 colour options that it could land on (red, yellow, green or blue). The colour that the wheel landed on for each person determined which society they would move into for the remainder of the game, in small groups.  
• Storytelling: in each corner of the room there was a red/yellow/green/blue flag with three symbols of it – participants gathered in their society groups based on the colour they had landed on with the wheel of fortune, and discussed what the symbols on their society flag represented, assigning a word to each symbol. They then were instructed to ask ChatGPT to write them a mission statement for their society based on those three symbols, and they wrote this mission statement on their flag. The entire group went around to visit each society and asked them questions about what their core beliefs and values were, and each small group got into an imaginative mindset telling the story of their society and the role they each played within it.
• Innovation/ideation/problem solving: after a coffee break, participants were confronted with the surprise announcement of a pandemic, and each society was given a different ‘pandemic problem’ that they were tasked with solving as a group through quickfire design and ideation activities (using a ‘Crazy 8s’ activity). Hannah then awarded and deducted points for each society team’s solutions, based on the categories of wealth, health, bougieness and financial literacy.
• Narrative conclusion: Participants then were informed that the pandemic restrictions had been lifted and they could visit other societies, and each person was tasked with meeting another participant from a different society and recounting the story of ‘how I got where I am today’, as a way of reviewing their character’s start in life, their ‘formative decisions’, the beliefs of the society where they lived, the scientific innovations they produced, and in summary, how this made them ‘who they are today’.
• Final scores: At the end, participants counted up the different tokens they had collected throughout the activities, and wrote their final scores on their identity cards. We then had a discussion about the experience and any reflections that it provoked.

Overall, the workshop provided a way of examining how games mechanics can be applied to different topics as an interactive way of bringing themes and issues to life. It also acted as a demonstration of the way creative methods can be brought into dialogue with conventional forms of research. The question of how to use creative methods within research is at the core of Hannah and Ella’s practice as artists and creative researchers, and this workshop was an important opportunity for Carla and Olly to learn more about Ella and Hannah’s arts-based practices and learn-by-doing. As a team we were then able to move deeper into conversations about using games mechanics to help enhance engagement with questions of commodification and desire in relation to housing data, within the Data Stories project.

Recently, the Data Stories team conducted a reading group on the theme of financialisation, a theme that closely intersects with how narratives around housing as an asset influence the handling and presentation of housing data in social housing. One article we read was Ioannue and Wójcik’s (2018) article, On financialisation and its future. In the article, the authors discuss the Financialisation, Economy, Society and Sustainable Development project (FESSUD), one of the largest projects on financialisation, which brings together scholars from various disciplines to theorise financialisation. On the need for interdisciplinary research, the authors write:  

“To be sure, such research is never a straightforward exercise, as there are a number of challenges involved, such as the question of which discipline forms the basis and which is invited to add insights (the sequence matters), as well as the risk of compromising disciplinary knowledge.”

At the conclusion of the FESSUD project, the authors agreed that seeking a unified theory of financialisation proved challenging in part because of people’s unwillingness to move beyond their methodological ‘comfort zones.’ While the authors were referencing difficulties in bridging quantitative versus qualitative approaches to realising a unified theory, the sentiment applies to the different methodological and epistemological approaches Ella, Hannah, Olly and Carla bring to the Commodity Narratives case study. In other words, whose methodology will be the foundational methodology that serves as a spring board for other methodologies? Whose methodology is getting compromised, if at all?

We do not yet have any answers. Research creation asks us to embrace this messy process. As such, the ongoing reflection between traditional academic research and arts-based research is indeed fruitful, even if at times confusing. Echoing the work of Natalie Loveless and Sarah Truman, to exist with the space and process of research creation necessitates levels of vulnerability and negating attempts to flee. It eludes a pragmatic application and blurs a clear line between start and finish. On Commodity Narratives, we continue to remain in this nebulous space, but it is one of both excitement and nervous anticipation. Stay tuned to see where we land. 

How can social housing practitioners, policy makers and academics meaningfully listen for, and act on, lived expertise? How can lived expertise be included at all stages of the social housing pipeline and housing management? These questions formed the basis for a workshop Danielle Hynes and Carla Kayanan developed for the International Social Housing Festival (ISHF) held in Dublin, Ireland from 4 – 6 June 2025.

The 2025 ISHF is the fifth year of this initiative, which was created by Housing Europe. Unfortunately, this year’s Festival was sponsored by AXA, French insurance firm and key target of the BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanction) movement, a Palestinian-led movement for freedom, justice and equality. The BDS movement is inspired by the South African anti-apartheid movement, and urges action to pressure Israel to comply with international law. During the session, Danielle and Carla acknowledge the tension of participating in a Festival sponsored by a BDS target, making a statement that pointed out this contradiction. They condemned the ISHF, described as a celebration of decent, affordable housing for all, accepting sponsorship from a company that is linked to funding arms for Israel while it destroys Palestinian homes and lives. This was well received by attendees at the session.

At the 1^st Data Stories workshop (The Data Politics of Planning and Property Data, September 2024) participants alerted us to the upcoming ISHF with Dublin as host. Danielle had presented a paper on the importance of political voice and listening and thoughts around existing tensions with incorporating lived expertise into social housing in an increasingly datafied world were percolating. The ISHF, with its theme on storytelling, appeared as the perfect venue to interrogate the role of lived experience as expertise. Carla and Danielle put their heads together and wrote an abstract for a 2-hour workshop to explore the topic. They invited John Bissett, community organiser at St. Andrew’s Community Centre, to join forces with them based on his close work with social housing residents and his acclaimed book, It’s Not Where You Live, It’s How You Live (Policy Press, 2023), which is an ethnography based on months interacting and listening to residents of a Dublin public housing estate. Through Data Stories we are experiencing the benefit of arts-based methods, and decided to incorporate an arts-based activity in the workshop.

Image: Markers and stickers sit in the foreground whilst workshop participants discuss introduced prompts in the background

The two-hour workshop began with group introductions. We quickly learned that participants came from diverse international backgrounds and a range of sectoral experiences from academia, the civil sector and social housing management. By way of introduction into the material, in small groups participants discussed what lived experience expertise meant to them. After a quick all-group discussion summarising key points from the conversation, Danielle and Carla provided a synopsis of theories on lived experience expertise, honing in on the importance of voice, epistemic justice and ensuring that structures are in place to bring in people with lived experience at all stages of the research and/or policymaking process. John then took up the mantel to discuss the making of his book, told through passages of the book that highlighted key points around class, gender and structural inequality. This concluded the first half of the workshop.

After a short break, participants were asked to reevaluate their understanding of lived experience in small groups based on the material from the first half of the workshop. Then Carla and Danielle invited participants to reflect on a number of prompts utilising creative, abstract methods to respond, using paper, markers and stickers.

Image: participants creatively respond to prompts shown on slide

Image: creative work prompts

After about 20 minutes of this art activity, participants shared what they had created. Everyone enthusiastically engaged in the creative aspect of the workshop, despite some self-effacing jokes about drawing abilities! The conversations generated through the artistic outputs were rich and insightful, each person spoke briefly about what they had thought through and how they responded. Key points arising from the discussion included the metaphor of knowledge exchange and collaboration as akin to water flowing, the value of acknowledging power differentials and working against hierarchy in lived experience expertise collaborations, the potential value of training for those working in service delivery to value and simply believe lived experience expertise, the many barriers that may be present for people to have a conversation at all (including available time, if someone is hungry, and the weather!), and a feeling of confusion around how to turn ideas into action.

Image: Participants respond to prompts creatively

Participants let us know that despite being uncertain and even sceptical about the creative prompts, they found this method of responding helpful to think through parts of their work they had not considered before. We thank all the participants for sharing their insights with us and embracing different ways of thinking. We would also like to thank Ella Harris and Hannah Mumby, Data Stories artists in residence, whose format of creative workshops inspired Danielle and Carla for this session.

Author: Juliette Davret

From 21 to 23 May, the annual French conference SAGEO (Spatial Analysis and Geomatics) took place in the historic city of Avignon, France. Juliette Davret, the French touch of our team, attended to present our research.

Day 1 – Supporting Early-Career Researchers 

The conference began with a workshop aimed at early-career researchers, focusing on the transition from academia to the public or private sector. It was a valuable and honest discussion, offering practical advice and personal experiences to help guide young researchers in shaping their future paths.

To wrap up the day, attendees enjoyed a guided tour of Avignon’s historic center, exploring the medieval architecture, narrow streets, and cultural landmarks like the Papal Palace. It was a great way to discover the city.

Day 2 – Parallel sessions and a taste of local life

The second day of SAGEO featured two sets of parallel sessions. In the morning, participants chose between Image Processing and Spatial Metrics, Graphs, Relation and Scales. Both offering in-depth presentations and new insights.

In the afternoon, attention shifted to sessions on Artificial Intelligence in Geomatics and Mapping, Spatialisation, and Geovisualisation, showcasing creative approaches to geographic data and emerging technologies.

That evening everyone gathered for a dinner at a “Guinguette” – a traditional, laid-back riverside restaurant typical of the region. It was the perfect setting to relax and connect with fellow researchers over good food and conversation.

Day 3 – Presenting on Digital Data

On the final day, Juliette presented our team’s recent work in the Digital Data session. This panel featured seven presentations exploring a wide range of topics: from digital globes and emotional cartography to coastal risk analysis and educational mapping tools. The room was full, and the discussions were lively and thoughtful.

Juliette presented the following paper:

Kitchin R., Davret J., Kayanan C. M. & Mutter S. (2025). Data mobilities: rethinking the movement and circulation of digital data. Mobilities, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2025.2481309

At the same time, another session focused on Mobilities was held. In the afternoon the conference concluded with two final parallel sessions on Climate and Biodiversity, bringing ecological themes to the forefront.

The full program of the conference is available here: SAGEO 2025 Program

A successful event

SAGEO 2025 stood out for its high-quality presentations, interdisciplinary themes, and engaged audience. Juliette was grateful for the opportunity to take part and to share our team’s research in such a dynamic environment.

Her participation was supported by Maynooth University Social Sciences Institute (MUSSI) through their Small Grants Scheme, which helped make the trip to Avignon possible.

This edition of SAGEO was not just about research, it was also about the community, collaboration, and celebrating the role of data and spatial analysis in tackling complex challenges.

 

Earlier this month Samuel Mutter and Danielle Hynes attended the Conference of Irish Geographers 2025, held at Queens University over three exceptionally sunny days. Danielle and Sam presented in two sessions: ‘Creative Methodologies’ and ‘Critical Geographies of Housing’.

In Creative Methodologies, Danielle and Sam discussed two aspects of their current work, focusing on their ongoing collaboration with artist Mel Galley on the theme of ‘data narratives’ and nascent work around photographing planning site notices around Ireland. In a presentation titled ‘Telling Data Otherwise: Creating Housing Data Stories through Researcher-Artist Collaboration in Dublin, Ireland’, they reflected on the collaborative process with Mel, tracing the work of artist and researchers to find ways of unsettling, countering or responding to mainstream data narratives of housing and planning through practices such as grid-based story writing. Meanwhile, reflections on site notice photography raised the potential for such approaches to foreground the emplaced and material qualities of data in the built environment.

Two other excellent presentations were delivered in this session. The first was from Gerry Kearns, Isabella Oberlander, Fearghus Ó Conchúir and Karen Till who discussed dance as a form of knowledge and the possibilities of tearmann aiteach / queer sanctuary. The second came from Ruodi Yang, who is exploring public space under neoliberalism through the lens of street performance.  

In the Critical Geographies of Housing session Sam presented findings from CATU’s Eviction Nation report, in place of Fiadh Tubridy who was unable to attend. Danielle presented on work undertaken during her PhD, examining the shift from government managed public housing to NGO-owned and managed community housing. This presentation was in conversation with Maedhbh Nic Lochlainn’s work, who also presented in this session, examining the similar shift from social housing delivered by Local Authorities in Ireland to the increasing growth of the AHB sector.

On the final day, attendees were invited on one of two field trips. Danielle attended a bus tour of Belfast, led by geologist and geophysicist Alastair Ruffell. Attendees visited various sites around Belfast and heard a little about the history of the city. Visiting the peace wall, two graveyards, and the new Grand Central Station (to drop off everyone heading home), Alastair told us some of the history of the city and his part in it as a forensic geologist.

We’d like to thank the organisers for such a wonderful and well run conference, and to all those who attended sessions where we presented and asked such engaged questions.

On Monday the 5th of May, postdoctoral researcher on the Data Stories project Sam Mutter participated in a day of events on Community Action Archiving at the Usher Street Community Centre, Dublin. 

The event was hosted by Tom O’Dea (NCAD) in collaboration with the Liberties Community Development Project and the Community Action Tenants Union (CATU), of which Sam is a member. The day was attended by a mixture of artists, community activists (including those from CATU) and NCAD students on the Masters in Art and Social Action.

Led by fellow members of the CATU archiving group Tommy Gavin and Jazz Burns, Sam helped facilitate a workshop practicing cataloguing for the CATU digital archive, using sample materials produced by CATU and other related Irish housing activist groups. Activities involved using a draft intake form developed by the archiving group to catalogue different types of record, from campaign leaflets and social media content, to documents from CATU’s Ard Fheis (Annual General Meetings).    

In a pragmatic sense, the activity provided feedback to the archiving group on how the intake form and associated processes could be clarified or improved with a view to opening up this process to other members via their local branches. However, it simultaneously prompted discussions around the politics of sensitivity and redaction (especially in the current global political climate), and the importance of cataloguing in this context being a collective endeavour which wherever possible involves the creators, users and/or subjects of the data in question.

The CATU workshop joined a selection of other interesting events throughout the day. This included a talk from Josh MacPhee of Interference Archive, based in New York, a brainstorming session around the potential for a physical housing action archive to be established in Dublin, and artistic works from NCAD students made using and in response to materials from the South Inner City Community Development Association (SICCDA) archive. 

Common themes across these sessions included the challenge of creating archives as an accessible space of lively engagement through which communities would feel an attachment to memories and histories, and be inspired to collective action – as opposed to more traditional conceptions of archives as dusty rooms full of carefully indexed boxes. This in turn sparked conversations around the balance to be struck between engagement and preservation, and the question of how archives might be meaningful and useful at a time when community and cultural spaces are frequently fighting against threats of removal in favour of more financially valuable land-uses.   

These discussions will help to shape the CATU archiving group going forward, as well as feeding into the broader findings of the Data Stories project. 

Since January, our project has entered a new phase, launching a fresh series of case studies. While most of these are based in Ireland, we’ve broadened our scope to examine data practices at the European level. Given that Ireland must comply with EU data collection standards, we wanted to explore how European harmonisation shapes data production in Ireland, how data flows across borders, and the political and critical issues surrounding data practices. 

To investigate these questions, Juliette Davret travelled to Luxembourg in late April to meet with representatives from Eurostat and ESPON. At Eurostat, she met with the team responsible for short-term business statistics, and at ESPON, she connected with the team working on the Housing4All project. 

Before these meetings, she also spoke with representatives from Ireland’s Central Statistics Office (CSO). These initial conversations helped her understand how Irish statisticians prepare and submit data to Eurostat and highlighted potential areas of friction or challenge in meeting EU requirements. These insights proved valuable in framing the discussions in Luxembourg.

Meeting with Eurostat representatives shed light on the complexities of data processing and standardisation across EU member states. They discussed the challenges of aligning timelines, addressing national data specificities, and creating entirely new datasets. These obstacles reflect broader tensions between Eurostat’s centralised data strategy and the diverse realities of data production in different countries, in line with what we have observed within Ireland’s own data ecosystem. 

At ESPON, the focus shifted to the topic of housing affordability and the difficulties of developing coherent data narratives at the European scale. Juliette met with both a project manager and a data manager, which offered complementary perspectives. A key challenge discussed was the lack of harmonised datasets, particularly concerning issues like housing vacancies and income. These data gaps make comparisons more difficult and challenge the development of evidence-based policies. The urgency of improving housing data was a recurring theme, especially given the strong role that data-driven narratives play in planning and housing policy across Europe.

This field visit deepened our understanding of the broader European data landscape and how national and EU-level priorities overlap. It also emphasised the importance – and the difficulty – of building comprehensive, harmonised datasets to support effective and equitable policymaking.