The XDATA program by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a self-organizing large-scale interfirm collaboration driven by an open process to develop open source computational techniques and software tools for processing and analyzing large data sets, commonly known as ‘big data’, with an annual budget of US$ 25M. Participating institutions include NASA, MIT, IBM, Boeing, the universities Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, Berkeley and Johns Hopkins, among others.

Our research, supported by the Parsons Institute for Information Mapping (PIIM), focussed on how conceptual mapping can be, in combination with infographics, expanded as a design method in complex collaborative R&D environments.