Due to the expanding use of visualisations in the digital sphere, our sensemaking of the world increasingly depends on how information and data is assembled for display (Kennedy et al., 2016), also in the field of education. Over the past years, growing critical attention has consequently been put on practices of design, which lie behind these visualisations and consist of a multi-layered process, reaching from strategic decisions and the involvement of various actors over the development of data-architectures to the creation of visual experiences that effectuate the behaviour of educational actors (Decuypere, 2021). Taking this crucial role of design for visualisations as a starting point, our contribution focuses on how three different schools in Hamburg, Germany, (re-)designed the interface of a Moodle-based learning management system (LMS) according to their pedagogical and organisational ideas. The case of Hamburg’s LMS is particularly interesting since the system´s original design on the one hand gives a lot of freedom to schools to visualise their individual ideas due to its open-source structure. On the other hand, the LMS design was deliberately pre-limited by the educational agency, thus inscribing particular ideas of schooling and its potential visualisation into the product. Assuming that platforms are no self-contained units, but rather constantly (re)enacted through interaction with their specific environment (Karasti & Blomberg, 2018), we worked with the three schools and media educators, following a Participatory as well as Critical Design approach (Brandau & Alirezabeigi, 2022), to design individual and context-related LMS interfaces.1 Integrating teachers and students as future users into the design process, the central idea was to empower them to understand the technology and, consequently, to develop a reflected and creative engagement with what it displays (Cumbo & Selwyn, 2021). Combining ethnographic insights from these co-design processes (Pink et al., 2022) with platform walkthroughs (Light et al., 2018), this contribution shows how oftentimes invisible design practices substantially influence the visual manifestations of LMS and, thus, the resulting data-based enactment of ‘the school’. Still, those practices can be partially made visible using a critical co-design approach and, in doing so, empower schools to constructively deal with datafication.

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