2024

Wolff Annika; Pässilä Anne; Owens Allan; Kantola Lasse

Environmental data may play a part in urban planning, especially to evidence negative impacts of proposed development on nature. However, its utility is only as good as people’s capability and willingness to make sense of it. Data storytelling is a common communication technique, but still places the audience in a passive role. In this chapter we explore data drama as an active and collective way for embodying and understanding data. We locate this arts-based genre in relation to the fields of applied drama and theatre and drama education, critical pedagogy, arts-based research, and data science. The imagination, emotions, and feelings are as central to the arts as cognition and rationality are to data science. We thus demonstrate how data drama may be used to build empathy towards the hidden concerns that the data can reveal and thus help explore more-than-human aspects of urban development.