Creating a Datascape: a game to support communities in using open data

Open data is a resource that both local governments and citizens can use for answering questions about a particular community and for innovating new products and services. In reality, there are a number of barriers to the use of open data, not least that citizens can find it difficult to make sense of available data and understand what sort of problems it may solve. In this paper we describe the development of a board game that is designed to help people to better understand the relationship between data, the environment from which it derives and the questions it can be used to answer. We describe the motivation for the game’s development, its current design and our ultimate intention, to create a tangible interactive, datascape. This work has been undertaken as part of a smart city educational programme