close

Projects

Dark Knowledge

We worked as part of the Data Stories project at Maynooth University to make a creative response to ongoing research into the way data is gathered and handled within the housing system in Ireland. During our year working with the project in 2025, we ran a series of workshops with 50+ housing professionals, researchers and policy makers in Dublin. The workshops used a metaphor of space exploration to examine the knowns and unknowns of the housing data system. Using metaphor helped us have conversations in a different register, to get beyond the minutiae of the way we normally talk about housing data issues.

These workshops were audio-recorded for research purposes, but we decided to also use the recording transcripts as the starting point for making a creative piece. The audio recordings were transcribed (very imperfectly!) by AI, and we worked with these unedited transcripts. We cut and pasted fragments of the transcribed audio from the workshops to assemble a new narrative. Every word of the dialogue that you read in our story has been pieced together using found phrases that we lifted from the transcripts. We decided to keep any errors made by the AI and incorporate them directly, because we are interested in the role of technologies in mediating information about land and housing.

What has resulted from this process is a story that uses the metaphor of space travel to explore some of the questions raised about how we approach data gaps and silences: What is out there that we don’t know or can’t recognise with our current data systems? What are the different incentives, desires and fears at play in our searches for ‘clean’ and synthesised data? Is the ambition to synthesise all data a futile one?

Even though the words from the transcripts have been cut out, taken out of context and rearranged, we believe that what we have ended up with presents an interesting, absurd commentary that can contribute to the continuing discussion about data within, and beyond, the worlds of academic research and housing.

Our story may not perfectly dissect or analyse the research issues, but may illuminate questions from new vantage points. The analogy of space exploration is only one way of thinking about the gaps and silences in data, but it has allowed us to approach these issues with humour and a playful sense of creativity, opening up issues that the researchers are facing and giving them a shape.

Read the full story here: Dark Knowledge PDF

Unreal Homes

Unreal Homes is a spoof property website that explores questions around desire and commodity in relation to housing by affectively emulating the experience of an ordinary ‘homeseeker’. Unreal Homes borrows the layout and features of commercial real estate property websites Daft.ie and MyHome.ie to create an interactive encounter that subverts the viewer's expectations and highlights the impossible challenges of the homeseeking process. Embedded games and interactive moments within the website explore the interplay of personal desires and market forces, animating tensions between fulfilling desires, navigating rules and making personal choices within structural conditions.

The interplay of the systemic and the personal in Unreal Homes touches on Lauren Berlant’s (2011) concept of ‘cruel optimism’, whereby the frustrating search for a home through habitual property searches and serial viewings becomes a compulsion, as the fantasy of a future lifestyle binds the seeker to the search despite its personal cost. This point is punctuated through the inclusion of the Therapy-Bot, a cheerful and designed-for-sympathy chatbot that attempts to assist the distressed user, though the satirical suggestions instead reflect their habituated desire back at them.

Unreal Homes is a research-creation collaboration with the Commodity Narratives team (Oliver Dawkins and Carla Kayanan) within the Data Stories project at Maynooth University.

You can access and interact with the site at www.unreal-homes.ie

Shell Yeah!

We were commissioned by the Public Engagement team at the University of Exeter to create a gameshow event that would showcase emerging research and make it engaging and accessible for a public audience.

We worked with a research team to ‘gamify’ elements of their research, and developed some of the core themes of the research into a game show format. The gameshow invited 2 teams and an audience of 50 people of all ages to engage in competive decision-making about farming king prawns, and one member of each team got the chance to play a prawn who at the end of the game raced to shed their shell.

“A brilliant way to engage people with a topic I knew nothing about. Fun and accessible!”

“Thank you for this great event! It's really engaging as a format and I knew nothing about prawn farming so it has made me curious.”

The Ideas Fund

The Ideas Fund is a grants programme run by the British Science Association and funded by Wellcome, which has brought communities and researchers together to build strong relationships and collaborate on mental wellbeing projects. Their work is supported by a focus on the emerging learning and insight and how this can influence the wider system, challenge norms and change the way research is funded.

We have been commissioned to work with The Ideas Fund for two years (2025-2027) to produce a total of eight interactive outputs that bring the insights from their learning to life, in ways that go beyond conventional outputs, embed real voices, resist linear explanations and help to engage wider audiences. In order to produce these, we have facilitated creative ideas development sessions with the Ideas Fund team, focusing on metaphors and visualising key messages, and then produced engaging interactive outputs with bespoke illustrations that embed audio and video media.

The first co-created output is a digital interface on the theme of ‘Reimagining Research’, that allows you to journey down three intersecting tunnels to explore themed insights. You can interact with it here: theideasfund.org/news/reimagining-research

Playing Human

Playing Human is a half-day workshop that takes participants on a journey exploring what it means to live a ‘successful human life’. It incorporates various interactive games mechanics like character building, imaginative & collaborative world building, collecting and losing points, consequences of making certain choices and chance.

The workshop is a playful and absurd invitation for participants to reflect on what happens when we use certain metrics to score or direct the way we move through life. It’s competitive, and silly, but with a serious reflective core that invites discussion and debate.

You can watch some footage of the game in action in the video below which also features Ella’s ‘Living Small’ boardgame:

Projects

About Us

Contact Us

Training