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In a series of recent projects, the Techno-Anthropology Lab (TANTlab) and its collaborators have developed an approach to STS making & doing, which we now call participatory data design (PDD). 1 PDD projects are often organized as so-called data sprints, three-to five-day intensive workshops where STS researchers collaborate with stakeholders in a particular field to collect and generate data that is relevant to a particular problem—and together create a useful digital device or object (Munk, Meunier, and Venturini 2019). Thinking about such collaborations as a form of participatory design raises the question of whether and how PDD experiments can create more equitable and locally beneficial forms of data use by engaging local actors in the work of finding relevant data and of building something meaningful out of it. But the engagement of local actors also comes with a degree of unpredictability. In our experience, these kinds of participatory projects are different every time and often involve a feeling of loss of control and ambivalence about the role of digital data. This chapter therefore does not offer a finished conceptual framework but rather a demo in the shape of a number of stories about our projects, their recurrent features, and some of the dilemmas and tensions that arise when making and doing STS with PDD. One of the central tensions that runs through the chapter is related to the contemporary imperative to do something digital in academia—and in society more generally. There is currently a strong interest in digital tools across the social sciences and humanities (Vertesi and Ribes 2019), which is something that TANTlab benefits …