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With the increase of Internet of Things devices in home environments, data will become an even more dominant part of people’s everyday lives. The invisibility of data leads us to rely on our imagination to make sense of them, yet this imagination is heavily shaped by a technocentric lens that views data as neutral and transparent. In response, in this article, we present the Data Epics project, where we commissioned seven fiction writers to write short stories based on smart home device data provided by seven households. We offer an analysis of the writers and households’ experiences with the project, presenting seven ways in which data imaginaries are made and unmade. We contribute a reflection around how making new data imaginaries unmakes common ones, the friction in unmaking certain imaginaries, and how we might further disseminate alternative data imaginaries. 

Much reporting on research-through-design (RtD) is vague about markers of time and temporal qualities. This lack of temporal attunement risks obscuring important contextual knowledge, hidden labour, material agencies and potential knowledge contributions. We turn to the notion of the event to articulate the granularities and nuances of RtD processes with an expanded vocabulary. We draw on prior calls from RtD practitioners, the philosophical roots of events, and our previous work with the term in our own research. We describe seven terms to expand the temporal vocabulary of RtD, which can be used to build narratives that emphasize knowledge created along the way, and relieve pressure from the ‘final’ artifact. Our contributions are 1) design events as an ontological shift and analytical tool and 2) a vocabulary that scaffolds design events as a sensitizing tool. We end with a call for more experimentation of non-chronological narratives of RtD.