In 2014 the world seemed awash with the positivity of hackathons. It seems a shared space between academia and industry that was welcoming, often for the first time, arts practitioners into their worlds. NASA was asking us to explore the vastness of their data universe, the Met Office the history of their weather, Penguin books on the future of publishing. Rethinking the nature of the ‘hackathon’ in the broader context of making things in a collaborative way, this first in the series of five books brings together explorative digital practices that unpack the physicality of relationships to data offered by the Internet of Things. The book includes contributions by BBC R&D, Microsoft Research, the Met Office, Uniform, the AHRC, REACT and the RCA.