Doing Civic Data Design

Rahul Bhargava, Director of the Data Culture Group and Assistant Professor in Journalism and Art + Design at Northeastern University

Join the event on YouTube Live on Wednesday, February 4, 2026, 5:30 PM EST with this link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXrVIerwGVg

About the Topic:

Data is now commonly used in community organizing, civic governance, newsrooms, and museums, but our tools have changed little. We’re stuck with surveys, spreadsheets, and charts designed for corporate boardrooms, approaches that weren’t designed for participation and empowerment. This talk will introduce various provocations that Rahul Bhargava has created over the last 15 years to push back on this disconnect. These include participatory data murals, playful museum exhibits, educational experiences for learners, data tools aids for journalists, interrogations of bias in AI, and collaboratively created machine learning models for human rights defenders. These all serve as examples of a creative approach to civic data design, creating digital and off-screen approaches that help communities to tell their own data stories.

About the Speaker: 

RAHUL BHARGAVA is an educator, designer, and artist working on creative data storytelling and computational journalism in support of social justice and community empowerment. He creates data murals and theatre with communities, award-winning museum exhibits, AI-powered civic technologies with CSOs, and delivers hands-on workshops and keynote talks across the globe. Rahul’s first book, Community Data: Creative Approaches to Empowering People with Information, is now available from Oxford University Press. He leads the Data Culture Group at Northeastern University as an Assistant Professor in Journalism and Art + Design. 

This event is brought to you by UConn’s Department of Digital Media & Design

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