Information+ 2025 Workshops

Participants in this workshop will experiment with different ways of visualizing data on the energy girls, women, and those who menstruate put into the preparation, management, and concealment of having a period. Energy, in this context, is defined as physical, emotional, and psychological energy that individuals put forth from the moment of their first period until their last. This energy is actively expressed on top of the energy needed for basic daily living for days to weeks each month, over decades of life. We will work with survey data of individuals aged 11-75 who have first-hand experience managing their own periods. This data includes stories as well as quantitative measures of the energy they each put forth during each cycle over a lifetime. We will use metaphors for energy amounts, such as the energy it takes to cook for and feed yourself, brush your teeth, and manage the flu, to invite non-menstruators to empathize with this common yet often invisible energy expression. During the workshop, individual participants will choose their data points and work through iterative rounds to create energy visualizations that, when put together, tell stories.

This participatory workshop invites you into a Pluriversal Civic Encounter—a collaborative space that celebrates the many ways data can be experienced and expressed.
This workshop seeks to connect the innovative and committed spirit of Chile’s 1970s Project Cybersyn with today’s local community issues, inviting participants to reflect and explore the challenges of our times, in our own contexts. Inspired by Cybersyn’s information model, it approaches data as a re-imagined, situated, and embodied practice, using experimental visual methods—such as written annotation and collage—that move beyond traditional and familiar ways of representing information.
This session will involve collective practices of storytelling, dialogue, and creative making, foregrounding how lived experiences can be transformed into critical visual narratives of data. Drawing on alternative approaches to information, we’ll challenge dominant narratives and reveal what is often overlooked—such as the emotions behind local policies or the real impact of community services.
Working together, participants will weave personal stories with public data and media sources, creating visualisations that reframe and recontextualise our shared realities. The result will be a collective model of local issues—as a critical data visualisation—that opens up a space for reflection and offers new ways to see and shape our communities.

Data sonification, the practice of representing data in the form of sound and music, is a unique and compelling method of expressing information. Sonification allows us to hear patterns in complex data, and consume information in a new and interesting way. In this workshop, participants will learn about data sonification as a concept, listen to several examples (with particular focus on the data topic of climate and energy), explore some of the existing research regarding sonification and design, and learn how to create their own data sonification compositions. Participants of this workshop will gain access to The Data Sonification Toolkit, a resource developed by Aura Walmer with support from the Reynolds Journalism Institute. This toolkit is designed to help journalists, information designers, and data enthusiasts learn about data sonification and discover how to apply it to their own work.

The goal of this workshop is to teach attendees basic conscious and responsible, strategies for motivating viewers towards action, and some compositional design principles to create information graphics for grassroots/political movements. This session will begin with a short presentation with visual examples. It will then move into some quick drafting games to practice basic design techniques. Attendees will then be given time to draft infographics and it will conclude with a group discussion of some of the drafted works to further explore strategies and opportunities to elevate the works. Attendees will benefit from this workshop by having the opportunity to get a crash course in conscious and responsible principles in design and strategies for motivating people to action. This is also an opportunity to practice quick drafting techniques to quickly move towards constructive dialogue to elevate the work. Attendees need not have design or data storytelling experience to join.

This workshop invites participants to rethink data collection—not just as a technical task, but as an opportunity to spark meaningful conversations with people. We will approach data collection design through an interactive, participatory, and purpose-driven lens. We’ll begin with a brief introductory session, featuring a short talk that explores different approaches and examples of how data can be gathered in ways that foster dialogue and engagement. Then, we’ll get hands-on: each participant or group will design their own analog data collection device. Finally, we’ll take our prototypes to the street to test them in real interactions—engaging people in conversation through a fresh tone, an accessible language, and a design centered on those we’re trying to reach.

This workshop addresses the urgent challenge of urban decarbonisation by exploring interdisciplinary methods for visualising and communicating building-level energy performance data. With cities responsible for over 70% of global CO₂ emissions, there is a growing need for integrated approaches that bring together spatial data infrastructure, energy modelling, visual communication, and civic engagement. Participants will be introduced to the Colouring Cities Research Programme (CCRP), a decentralised network of national, open-source platforms developed by academic consortia to support energy transitions and the UN Sustainable Development Goals. These platforms offer fully open-access, standardised spatial data on buildings, covering over 150 variables across 12 categories, and are designed for cross-sector use by researchers, policymakers, local authorities, and communities. With research groups in more than 30 countries and collaborations involving over 150 researchers, CCRP is rapidly expanding as a global infrastructure for open building data. The workshop will demonstrate how CCRP platforms support the visualisation and analysis of energy performance data to identify retrofit priorities, harmonise energy certification methods across countries, and improve the reliability of datasets through integrated approaches such as crowdsourcing, computational inference, and bulk data processing. Case studies from Sweden and the UK will be presented to demonestrate how the CCRP support the implimentation of EPC.

This collaborative quilting workshop uses physical making techniques to understand complex data more deeply and create a shared artifact representing local data on energy usage as it has changed over time. We will discuss the historical (and extant) role of fiber arts in representing data, often in the communication of science as well as for social and political causes. Then, participants will make individual quilt blocks that will form a final collective quilt, which the organizers will assemble after the session. Over the course of the workshop, participants will receive an overview of how other creators represent information across many domains through a variety of textile mediums, including quilting, crochet, knitting, embroidery, and more, and how these projects are commonly structured. We will discuss an encoding schema for fiber arts, looking at how the geometric and material properties of the mediums afford representing variables in multiple ways. For the workshop, we will focus on color scheme and ‘quantity’ to demonstrate how participants can design their pieces to contribute to the community quilt, while also noting several categories of layouts makers use to embed structures into their projects. We will provide communal color schemes and encoding guidelines, and participants will make creative decisions on the marks and layouts of their quilt blocks. No previous sewing or fiber arts experience is required.