Biodata Futures
2020-2022
Biodata–data about people's bodies and behaviours–is increasingly pervasive, from wearable sensors such as Fitbit to smart environments sensing breathing and heart rate through walls. Amidst consumer products and HCI research
enrolling biodata to support fitness, mindfulness, or other aspects of health, design research has been engaging biodata from an exploratory perspective, including critiquing and reflecting on bodily experiences surrounding biodata tracking. Along similar lines, other works explore expressive engagements with biodata visualisations or materialisations that can provoke new understandings surrounding bodies and experiences of being tracked. As biodata design research continues to grow and expand, we asked: What are emergent directions within biodata design research? What biodata design futures can we imagine and like? With these questions as a starting point, we held a workshop that consisted of three sessions, detailed on page 3, convening biodata researchers and practitioners to discuss emergent possibilities for biodata design research:
Theme 1: Expanding notions of biodata and bodies, expanding
what counts as biodata, and what counts as a body to measure.
Theme 2: Attending to a greater diversity of human bodies and
experiences with biodata, especially in ways that challenge
existing regimes of measurement of meaning-making.
Theme 3: Fostering biodata collaborations between human and
other (non-human) bodies.
With Laurens Boer, Noura Howell, Pedro Sanches, and Vasiliki Tsaknaki
Publications:
- Fabulating Biodata Futures for Living and Knowing Together (DIS 2022)
- Diffraction-in-action: Designerly Explorations of Agential Realism Through Lived Data (CHI 2022)
- Challenges and Opportunities for Designing with Biodata as Material (NordiCHI 2020)
