Brooke Leave Home is a personalized film designed to engage a non-expert audience with open data about the support young adults receive when leaving the care system in England. The film draws upon a range of video-based data storytelling techniques to present each viewer with a personalized perspective on the topic based on data from their own local area. We present the film's design and describe how its storytelling techniques were developed to support viewers in understanding, and fostering empathic connections with, the data sources featured and the implications they have for care leavers. We also present a study with 47 viewers, which explores how these techniques were experienced and how effective they were in aiding engagement with the data included and its meaning.
Connected devices present new opportunities to advance design through data collection in the wild, similar to the way digital services evolve through analytics. However, it is still unclear how live data transmitted by connected devices informs the design of these products, going beyond performance optimisation to support creative practices. Design can be enriched by data captured by connected devices, from usage logs to environmental sensors, and data about the devices and people around them. Through a series of workshops, this paper contributes industry and academia perspectives on the future of data-driven product design. We highlight HCI challenges, issues and implications, including sensemaking and the generation of design insight. We further challenge current notions of data-driven design and envision ways in which future HCI research can develop ways to work with data in the design process in a connected, rich, human manner.
Internet of Things (IoT) technologies for the home are gaining in popularity, generating exponential data byproducts. Yet, everyday relationships between home dwellers and domestic IoT data often remain secondary interactions, preventing deeper understanding and awareness of data tracked in the home. Our paper offers a design ethnography and design inquiry which examine these human-data entanglements. Findings from working with 10 inhabitants who interact with their IoT data illustrate five characteristics of current data encounters: manifesting, inquiring, exposing, repositioning, and broadening. In response, we used speculative sketches to refine, refract and complicate these encounters. We argue that data do not have to be laborious, tidy or the byproduct of a service, but rather lively and affecting. We further suggest new modes of engagement with data which expand or step away from self-improvement and reflection: through diverse acts of noticing, by allowing data to remain invisible, and by embracing imaginative practices.
In this paper, we present the High Water Pants: speculative wearable technology which makes climate change tangible for everyday cyclists. The pants work by mechanically shortening when a cyclist wearing the pants enters an area of Seattle, USA, which is projected to be impacted by sea-level rise in 30-80 years. This interaction 'bends time' by allowing cyclists to feel future climate change data in the present. First, we discuss the research through design process of creating the High Water Pants including foundational research, a description of the design concept and results of a preliminary study with the pants. Second, we discuss three implications of the pants for human-computer interaction (HCI): (1) they offer the concept of a 'present/future' paradigm for embodied speculation, (2) our research process demonstrates how to successfully involve more-than-human perspectives, and (3) we articulate how the High Water Pants respond to shifts in HCI's framing of sustainability.
This paper introduces "infrastructural speculations," an orientation toward speculative design that considers the complex and long-lived relationships of technologies with broader systems, beyond moments of immediate invention and design. As modes of speculation are increasingly used to interrogate questions of broad societal concern, it is pertinent to develop an orientation that foregrounds the "lifeworld" of artifacts—the social, perceptual, and political environment in which they exist. While speculative designs often imply a lifeworld, infrastructural speculations place lifeworlds at the center of design concern, calling attention to the cultural, regulatory, environmental, and repair conditions that enable and surround particular future visions. By articulating connections and affinities between speculative design and infrastructure studies research, we contribute a set of design tactics for producing infrastructural speculations. These tactics help design researchers interrogate the complex and ongoing entanglements among technologies, institutions, practices, and systems of power when gauging the stakes of alternate lifeworlds.