Design Data Literacy – Impact of Data Literacy in Virtual Product Development

In today’s information age, due to the massive amounts of data generated, an understanding about the interaction with data is becoming increasingly significant. While in virtual product development of technical components, a lot of research regarding the collection and storage of data exists, we identified missing key competencies for the interaction with design data. In the collaborative and multidisciplinary design process of technical products, designers are missing knowledge about: the origin of a data piece, an understanding about the reliability of a source, as well as transparency to whom their data is distributed and how it is further used. Approaching this problem, we identified the necessity of providing designers with relevant skills and information. Therefore, we developed a novel concept for the introduction and application of Data Literacy to product development in order to create transparency and awareness for a responsible generation and use of design data. The concept is called Design Data Literacy and consists of the 3 major pillars: Data Provenance, Data Tracking and Tracing, as well as Data Sovereignty. To validate the concept, we conducted a prototypical implementation and evaluation. We came to the conclusion that the presented concept can be used effectively to introduce and apply Data Literacy to product development.