The PhD project draws on ethnographic, interview, and collaborative methods to explore how data practitioners produce data solutions to social problems. The main fieldwork sites are competitions, events, and hackerspaces where participants practice and compete in working out how to solve problems with data and technology.

It asks:
1) how social problems are translated into data problems that can be solved with data,
2) what kinds of knowledge are brought into that process,
3) how practitioners present data solutions
4) what (understandings of) ‘data’ practitioners use to do their work

The project reflects on imagined futures like those of the data-driven society or the age of surveillance capitalism and aims to base them in an understanding of how data-based solutions are produced.