The international Love Data Week will take place from 12-16 February 2024. Various Swiss universities are offering numerous online events on the topic of “Show your kind of data!”.

We are taking part in this year’s programme with a contribution by the Critical FAIRness project. Critical FAIRness is an exploratory study on open research data in art and design at the Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW, Switzerland, funded by swissuniversities. The project investigates the critical state of publishing in art and design. While practice-based research in art and design has existed in Switzerland for more than 20 years, there is a lack of infrastructure that bridges the gap between the everyday documentation practices of researchers and infrastructures for making creative approaches public, such as data repositories. The term “critical” is meant in the sense of urgency to act and help develop advanced infrastructures and formats that understand the process of sharing research data as socio-technological, take the claim of democratization of research seriously, and augment the operations of practice-based research.

The talk focuses on the practices of open research data in practice-based research in art and design, by discussing the principles of FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) and juxtaposing these to the principles of CARE (Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, and Ethics) which could be seen as a revision of FAIR.