FINGER 01 (The thumb)
Data Foraging
Every meal starts before the kitchen. You walk out, see what's growing, and bring the right basket. We do the same with data. Ready-made datasets miss things: the voices and traces that never got recorded. So we invent our own collection tools. Interviews that don't feel like interviews. Installations that listen. How you gather information decides what you can ever know.
Finger 01Data Foragingin motion
Build the tool that sees what the old ones miss.
FoodWalk out and gather the food.
DataBuild the tool that sees what the old ones miss.
Finger 01: Data Foraging. Forage. Search the field before deciding what deserves to be gathered.Food metaphor: Walk the terrain. Notice what is actually growing. Data equivalent: Look past the ready-made dataset for the missing voices.
Finger 01 / field ethics
Foraging has rules
You are gathering from people, not from a forest floor. So the basket comes with rules. Consent before capture, and consent that can be withdrawn later. Anonymity by default when a story could hurt the person who told it. We delete what we no longer need, and the people we forage from can say no at any point, including after they said yes. Some data we refuse to collect at all. A tool that could exist is not always a tool that should. War & Love sits in uncomfortable territory here. Matching with soldiers through a dating app reached voices nothing else could, and it stretched the consent rule to do it. We show it because the tension is real, not because it is resolved.[5] say no[4] refuse
Finger 01 / in practice
2 DDS projects
These examples show what it does in real work.
Finger 01 / Example 01 · Domestic Data Streamers / La Panera Art Center
The Feeling of Patients
Mapping how a hospital feels, so patients know they are not alone.
During an art stay with La Panera Art Center, we worked with cancer patients and their companions in the oncology ward of Arnau de Vilanova Hospital in Lleida. Some were undergoing treatment. Others had come out the other side. We soon discovered that interviews did not represent the full range of their problems and perceptions, so we began using Polaroid cameras to help them illustrate the hospital spaces that made them feel fear, love or loneliness: the reception desk, the waiting room, the radiotherapy unit and everything in between. The photographs brought new reflections to hospital staff and changed how they saw their everyday place of work.
- Art-stay fieldwork
- Emotional mapping
- Participatory photography
Finger 01 / Example 02 · Jordi Farreras / MADD student project, 2022
War & Love
Tinder as a fieldwork tool: matching with soldiers in war zones to ask them about love.
For his 2022 MADD student project, Jordi Farreras bought Tinder Premium, set his location near deployed war zones and matched with soldiers. A dating app became a research instrument, reaching people no survey would ever find. All soldiers were asked for consent before the interviews began.
- Platform repurposing
- Geolocated outreach
- Conversational fieldwork
