Nate participated at a one day interdisciplinary conference held at the University of Westminster that explored the possibilities of going beyond the limitations of liberal-modernist policy-making and urban planning and the implications of doing so. His talk, entitled ‘Dashboard, Designs, Principles and Data Signals’ can be watched here.

Ana presented a paper entitled ‘Big Data and the Economy’ at an event on Big Data organised by Warwick’s Q-Step Centre. The paper explored the new challenges poised by the new circulation and different mode of visually presenting economic indicators. You can listen to Ana’s talk here.

Nate presented a paper entitled Cognitive Scaffolding and the Data Unconscious: On Decision Support Systems at the Data Power Conference. Here’s the abstract:

As both a branch of management theory and a set of real implementations, Decision Support Systems (DSS) first emerge in the 1950s. DSS bring together conceptions of organisational structure, practices of managerial decision-making and computing into relation for the first time. Organisations are conceived as having three levels of operation, each corresponding to its own types of decision-problems, from highly structured at lower levels and unstructured at higher levels. DSS are one of the first systems to use computers to collect data about the performance and overall operation of an organisation or other system. In this respect, all contemporary organisations the routinely collect, visualized and used data to make decisions are indebted to DSS.

Genealogical inquiries into DSS reveals much about the data-driven present. It shows how computational systems deployed within organisations not only foster and encourage specific modes of attention and perception, but how actual implementations are derived from managerial and organisational thought. As semi-automated forms, DSS operationalise and thus make durable a managerial weltanschauung, and fold in conceptions about the user, the limits of automation, what must and can be ‘datafied’ and to what ends. Interrogating this history is urgent as even the most cursory glance of contemporary literature – on business performance dashboards, for example – reveals that the founding concepts and systematic arrangements of this field still inform the present, though in largely unconscious ways.

Nate presented some of the work we have undertaken as part of our empirical study of the use and design of dashboards at the Government Digital Service as part of The Politics of Big Data Conference. The paper was entitled The Performance Platform: Governing through Design and here is the abstract:

The routine operations of government are being transformed through the implementation of new online platforms, web analytic and user research techniques, ‘agile’ (management) methods, and the introduction of design principles. Government is understood as a standardized platform; its services subject to continuous performance measures and data analysis, and its citizens reconfigured as users. Recognising that data-driven systems have long been part of business intelligence and performance management, I reflect upon an ongoing study of Government Digital Service to consider what is unique about these practices coming together in public administration.

 

Nate was invited as keynote speaker at the seventh Digital Methods Initiative’s Winter School entitled ‘Show me Your Dashboard: New Media Monitoring and Data Analytics as Critical Practice’. You can download Nate’s paper here.

Nate discussed dashboards in the context of a Cybersalon talk and in conversation with Raul Espejo, former Operational Director of Project CYBERSYN. The seminar explored the contrast between Stalinist economic management and visions of a bottom-up cybernetic communism. You can watch the talk here.

Ana attended the Interface Critique Conference on Nate’s behalf at UdK Berlin. A range of speakers from different backgrounds were brought together to talk about different types of interfaces: communicational, spatial, computational, etc. We presented an outline of our research project and suggested how by observing the use of dashboards in a range of settings our project seeks to problematise these types displays as interfaces which afford a range of effects to unfold. We also speculated around the notion of ‘unequal calculating capacities’ (coined but not thoroughly explored by Michel Callon 2007) in order to think about how the use of dashboards might intervene in reproducing  information and therefore calculating asymmetries.

Nate gave a talk at the Programmable City Seminar at Maynooth University. You can watch Nate’s talk here.

Academics, public and private sector representatives gathered together on the 10th October of 2014 at DEMOS’s office in London for the launch of our Dashboard project. An introduction was given by Carl Miller one of our partners at DEMOS-CASM who highlighted the need to explore how dashboards need to be interrogated and critiqued further both from an academic as well as policy perspective. You can listen to the full discussion here

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