Hi, I'm April! ⋆✴︎˚｡⋆

I’m a researcher and strategist with a focus on digital culture and design anthropology. I'm currently working as a Senior Insights Manager (Qualitative) at Dig Insights.I have over 5 years of professional experience across community management in gaming, design research, and qualitative market research.I hold a Bachelor’s in Anthropology from McGill University and an MA in Design for Change from the University of Edinburgh.I was a Design Research Resident at the London Design Museum from 2023-2024.📍 Toronto, Canada

Design Researchers in Residence: Hot Data

While in residence at the Design Museum, I examined the relationship between digital data and heat, from solar panels on a balcony in Barcelona to a data centre waste heat network on the outskirts of Dublin. I materialized my findings in the "Data Do-Nothing Machine."

An Ethnography of Data Centres

For my MA thesis, I spent time in the seaside town of Cockenzie, Scotland. Here, I explored the tension between a government proposed plan for a data centre and community visions for land use.

Community Strategy for Dead by Daylight

For 3 years, I worked at the video game studio Behaviour Interactive (Montreal, Canada), building a community around their most popular game.

Design Researchers in Residence: Hot Data

Question: How might I materialize the heat of the Internet while inviting alternative visions of its future?

Project Overview

I was selected as one of four Design Researchers in Residence at the Design Museum (London, UK) for their 2023-24 cohort. This program, run by the Future Observatory and funded by UKRI's AHRC, supports early career researchers with the funding and space we need to explore a theme related to the climate crisis; this year’s theme was “SOLAR.”The brief was for: "research proposals that consider design for and against heat and light in the context of the climate emergency."Jumping off from my master's thesis, I proposed an exploration of the potential for waste heat generated by data centres to be harnessed and redistributed to communities, through an ethnographic study of one such community. This project was titled "Hot Data."

Me (second from the right) and the three other Design Researchers in Residence, Freya Spencer-Wood, Eliza Collin and Jamie Irving, for the SOLAR cohort. (Photo by Justine Trickett, 2023).

Field Site

Tallaght is a suburb of Dublin, Ireland and the site of Ireland’s first district heating network, sourced from the waste heat of an Amazon Web Services data centre. This scheme is owned entirely by the county council.In Ireland, data centres have become controversial: they account for 18% of the country’s metered electricity, more than all of Ireland’s urban households. This large power share implicates the tech industry in Ireland’s inability to meet its carbon reduction goals.

The AWS data centre in Tallaght. Heatworks Energy centre on its right hand side. (Photo by Stephanie Strifert, 2024.)

Methodology: Design Anthropology

For this research project, I travelled to Tallaght to a examine the data centre waste heat network as it warmed public buildings. I conducted contextual inquiry, interviews, and participant observation with heat network professionals and recipients.I synthesized my field notes and interview data into a written output: a speculative ethnography of the cultural perceptions, and changeable future, of the data centre at Tallaght's heart. Read the ethnography here.In addition to my field research on Tallaght's heat network, I also conducted a series of online in-depth interviews with Low-Tech Magazine, a team of designers working on a solar-powered website. Read the article here.For the design phase of the project, I recruited and led a team of two designers in a series of in-studio design workshops. Together we prototyped and iterated several cultural probes objects, which were meant to materialize my findings from the field and engage the public at the Design Museum.

Interviewing a heat network professional, in the energy centre. (Photo by Stephanie Strifert, 2024.)

"At the time [the centre was built], the Council made an agreement with Amazon to install collectors on the top. A data centre without the heat collectors, for us, it's nothing."-*Enver, Manager of HeatWorks Energy Centre

1. One of my interviewees, a heat recipient, showing me the boiler room in County Hall. 2. Pipework within Heatworks Energy Centre. 3. Me, taking observational notes in Tallaght. (Photo by Stephanie Strifert, 2024.)

Design Process: Ideation

I reached out to designers/technologists Drs. David Chatting and Cally Gatehouse to collaborate on the design of my cultural probe object. I used Miro to present findings from my field visit and led free-association brainstorming sessions.