As data plays an increasing role in civic decision making, diverse organizations are facing pressure to engage in data work. The HCI community has explored both the potential of and challenges to integrating robust data practices in mission-driven organizations. At each step – from collection, to storage, to analysis, to maintenance – these organizations need to develop tools and practices that balance internal operational needs and external community priorities. This work reports on an 11 month-long collaboration with a mission-driven hybrid organization that has designed tools and procedures for collecting data that enact an ethic of care. This caring data practice is characterized by defining success through relationships, attending to the social and cultural community context, and protecting vulnerable populations through non-collection. We share the organization's practices, analyze how they support the organization in providing care, and offer recommendations for building caring data systems.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3580831
With the massive adoption of smartphones, location trackers, and GPS-based applications, data is being generated that captures people’s geographic locations in more precise detail than ever before. Personal location history archives offer a potentially valuable and overlooked resource for supporting reminiscence and recollection of the past. Yet, little design research has explored how location histories can be used as a material in designing such experiences. To investigate this space, we engaged in a practice-based design research process that resulted in two design artifacts. Memory Tracer is a tangible device that occasionally, yet perpetually surfaces locations from the past bound to today’s date. Memory Compass is a smartwatch application that uses a ‘casting’ interaction enabling a user to retrieve and explore locations from their past, across space and time. We unpack and reflect on key decisions in our design process and conclude with opportunities for future HCI research and practice.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581426
Given decades of Human computer interaction (HCI) research focused on scientific empiricism, it can be hard for the field to acknowledge that data analysis is both an emotional and speculative process. But what does it mean for this process of data analysis to embrace its situated and speculative nature? In this paper, we explore this possibility by building on decades of HCI mixed methods that root data analysis in design. Drawing on an autoethnographic design inquiry, we examine how data analysis can work as an implicating process, one that is not only critically grounded in a designer’s own situation but also offers modes of imagining the world otherwise. In this analysis, we find that autobiographical design can help HCI scholars to respond to current critiques of speculative design by grounding and rendering more personal certain kinds of speculation, opening a space for diverse voices to emerge.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3580902
In recent years, there has been a notable proliferation and diversification of works in HCI, that integrate living microorganisms; an imperative lifeform dominating ecosystems of our planet. Yet despite the growing interest, there is a lack of structured lenses with which designers can strategize their processes of surfacing livingness; a material quality inherent in living artefacts with a potential to enrich user experiences and to initiate mutualistic care between humans and microorganisms. Through a systematic artefacts review and a case study on Flavobacteria, we have developed and instantiated a Taxonomy of Surfacing Livingness in Microbial Displays, consisting of six microbe-sensitive, tuneable mechanisms for human noticing of microorganisms: 1) Canvassing, 2) Marking, 3) Magnifying, 4) Translating, 5) Nudging, and 6) Molecular Programming. The taxonomy invites diverse and adaptable ways of generating and crafting microbial displays; towards overcoming microbe-specific surfacing constraints, integrating diverse stakeholders' values, and enabling nuanced address of microbial welfare.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581417
While data are the backbone for home Internet of Things’ (IoT) functional and economic model, data remain elusive and abstract for home dwellers. In response, we present the Odd Interpreters (OIs): a collection of three artifacts that materialize alternative ways of engaging with IoT data in home environments. The OIs recast home data as imaginative sounds (Broadcast), fading fabric (Soft Fading), and cookie recipes (Data Bakery) with the intent to reveal the hidden human labor and material infrastructures of data and to critique data’s assumed objectivity. Following a Research-through-Design approach, we unpack design events that mark our process for making the Odd Interpreters. We conclude with a discussion around the need for pluralizing data encounters, the tactic of designing between illusion and precision, and a reflection on living with the prototypes while designing.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581323
This project uses research through design to explore how metadata could be used as a design material to create inheritable artefacts that make personal legacy experiential. Metadata is produced as traces of life, and by designing artifacts that capture and represent these traces, interaction design offers the possibility to experience the everyday practices of someone else as they are passed on and inherited. We use interviews with people interested in data practices, memorializing, and who have experienced grief to find themes and insights for designing with metadata as well as for legacy. Based on these, we developed the prototype Anekdota, a handheld metadata detector that lets an inheritor experience bequeathed location metadata. From a series of think-aloud walks, Anekdota was tested with participants to reveal sensitizing concepts for designing for metadata, and imaginative leaps for how this metadata may become a part of future legacy practices.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581495