Data Through Design
2026 Open Call

Data Through Design (DxD) is an annual exhibition featuring art works that creatively analyze, interpret and interrogate data made available in New York City’s Open Data portal. The DxD collective is pleased to announce our DxD 2026 Call for Proposals—seeking new art work, or work in progress not yet exhibited, that engages creatively with tangible and/or multimedia expressions of NYC’s Open Data.

This year, we invite projects that explore ecosystems and cycles of life—how data expresses rhythms of growth, decay, renewal, and transformation, as well as the interplay between human and non-human worlds.

We encourage artists to consider how the city, our communities, and data itself can be understood as ecological and cyclical: what accumulates, erodes, regenerates, or lingers as traces? How might data be materialized, embodied, or inscribed by natural processes? How might art reveal the ways human and natural systems shape and respond to one another?

Proposals may engage with living systems, natural or urban ecologies, or information ecosystems. They might examine materiality and craft, murmurations and flows, entropy and genesis, or the sublime scale of ecological change. We are especially interested in work that makes data felt, witnessed, or transformed—through physicalization, interaction, or by exposing how nature itself records and inscribes change.

In our conceptualization of  “ecosystems and cycles of life—both natural and constructed,” we mean more than the natural environment. We invite a broad take on these themes and projects that use data to investigate interconnected systems of information, culture, cities, communities, nature and materials.

How to submit a proposal:

Please use the Google form (link below) to submit project proposals to be part of a multiple media group exhibition to be held in New York City in March of 2026. DxD presents work in a wide range of media and formats such as digital, analog, physical, performance, sound works, walks, installations, creative coding, participatory mapping, drawings, etc.  We welcome proposals that expand beyond the gallery walls and will support projects that occur in public spaces and in unconventional formats. Please see some samples of past exhibitions on our website. 

Artists are expected to reference or use at least one NYC Open Data dataset in their project. Other data, including data derived from novel and experimental collection systems, are welcome (in conjunction with the use of NYC Open Data data). We’re interested in participatory data collection; in radical and cognitive mapping; in data that is represented or experienced through time, sound, and other senses.

Stipend: DxD will provide a $900 stipend for project fabrication, as well as installation and promotional support to each project artist or artist team. Please note: applicants must be approved to work in the US in order to be paid a stipend. 

Exhibition Details: Exhibition will take place in late March 2026 in New York City with specific dates to be announced. Artists should plan to have work exhibition-ready by the first week of March.

Data Through Design is committed to supporting a diverse range of voices and perspectives. We encourage submissions from a wide range of artists, civic technologists, data enthusiasts, city dwellers, and creative practitioners in all formats. 

Learn more about Open Data Week

There are lots of ways to participate in NYC Open Data Week! If you have an idea for a project that doesn’t fit into a DxD art exhibition proposal, explore other Open Data Week participation options at open-data.nyc.

Proposal submission date:  Sunday, November 2, 2025, by 11:59 PM (EST)