The exhibition *Data×Design* explores how data have become a new material for design. At a time when everything can be measured, recorded, modelled, or even predicted, design turns to data not only to produce new representations of the world today, but also to “tell the story” of this invisible field of vast data stores and torrential flows, and to ask questions about all of the different ramifications.
A whole new generation of designers has thus embraced data, not only to represent or visualise this resource, but also to translate it into materials, objects, structures, movements and sensory experiences. Between algorithmic computation and human decision-making, the projects presented question both these new data-driven aesthetics and the cultural, social, and political stakes of a “datafication” of the world.
Context
The data being produced, generated and exchanged digitally have now seeped into every aspect of our daily lives, at work, at home, and across the widest range of leisure activities and pursuits. Stored within vast data centres, their volume continues to grow, on a scale that quite literally escapes our comprehension. The still recent rise to prominence of artificial intelligence plays an important role in this trend.
However, this omnipresence does not translate into any form of perceptible physical manifestation. They are described as massive, yet their accumulation remains invisible. They circulate before our eyes, on our screens, yet they never take on any recognisable form. This paradox, the source of a certain sense of “unease”, is described by several researchers and intellectuals as a strong indication of a lack, if not a sensory “deficit”, within our new digital lives. To address this void in some way, and to facilitate a sensory manifestation of data, understood here in an aesthetic and phenomenological sense, designers have embraced this material to give it form and shape, as well as colour, matter, structure, and texture. By multiplying fields of expression – furniture, objects, sculptures, installations and graphic representations, visualisations, and materialisations – these creators, like digital craftsman, carry out forms of “translation” or physical conversions of data, from computational abstraction to tangible reality, towards an artistic reification of data.
