‘Unsolvable within existing regimes’: Using a Systems Thinking Approach to Co-design for Data Governance in Cities

Despite people’s significant role in generating data in cities, their involvement in data governance (DG) remains limited, failing to address the inherent complexity of DG and undermining their ’right to the city’. We propose a collaborative systems thinking approach as a scoping tool for co-design, enabling researchers and designers to involve people in co-creating an understanding of the systemic structures underpinning DG in cities and developing prototypes and solutions informed by these structures. Using causal loop diagrams, we facilitated the development of a conceptual model of DG. Participants, representing diverse perspectives, created individual causal loop diagrams that were merged into a collaborative causal loop diagram (C-CLD). This C-CLD was employed in an interactive workshop to identify intervention points and develop targeted solutions. Our findings demonstrate how C-CLDs can accommodate multiplicity, foster agonism, and enable participants to challenge political dimensions and existing systemic structures. Moreover, the engagement process revealed the complexity of DG in the city, as perceived by the collective of participants, resulting in three key submodules that highlight tensions between citizen sensitisation to data collection, the private sector’s role in fulfilling citizens’ needs, and the struggles faced by local governments. This work draws on and extends HCI research that engages with systems thinking ontologies, contributing to an HCI that includes the political, moves beyond solutionism, and advances social justice-oriented approaches.