Reflection Through Representations Of Personal Data-Karyda
#notesFromPaper Year : Tags : data visualization, reflective visualizations Authors: Karyda Mekler Lucero
Used data agents to encourage reflection by placing individual experience in relation to others.
Previous work has shown that engaging in visualizations of personal information can help individuals arrive at newfound understandings about themselves and encourage behavioral change.
A data agent is a mundane object combined with people’s personal data in a meaningful way.
Fleck and Fitzpatrick’s framework to describe different levels of reflection.
Mekler and Hornbaek's reflection framework to help articulate how these data agents prompted deeper levels of reflection.
Choe et al: Participant insights during data visualizations, but possibly flawed study
Li et al. two phases of reflection: Discovery and maintenance, which requires different data collection. ubicomp can improve data collection.
Rooksby et al. discusses the effect of data collection that is enmeshed in someone’s life.
Elsden et al. is about long term and retrospective use of data.
Fleck and Fitzpatrick's reflection framework
pg 3 has some other examples of designers that have created visualizations and physicalizations. Involving the body aids in reflection.
Carpenter et al. said devices gain the most meaning if they are non-screen, tangible, crafts-based, everyday.
data visceralisations: data visualizations that just don’t feel right.
Mekler and Hornbæk: data representations should not only support sense making (comprehending the data) but also meaning making (figuring out how to relate the experience to themselves.)
Project 1
gift giving as a way to reflect on the giver and receiver. Participants had to give gifts to strangers in a white elephant.
Participants were confused, where did the information for these gifts come from? Many were surprisingly personal.
Gathering all this personal information on someone else made participants reflect on their online personas.
Project 2
Fitbit data visualized in a way that is particular to each participant and an experience they’ve had.
Participant got two job offers and celebrated w/ beer w/ friends. Got a beer bottle w/ heartbeat data on it.
Participant drummed for three hours at a concert, got a pick w/ heartbeat data. Thought it was an incredible souvenir, a part of himself.
Participant needed to change their lifestyle for a month in India, was given a curry container. The container became a conversation piece
These data agents became material interpretations of the participants, snapshots of identity and time.
Project 3
Zimmerman et al. says design practice is about making commercially successful products, but design researchers create “carefully crafted questions”.
Menstrual health is an important feminist issue and intersects with global poverty. Women around the world make menstrual pads out of a variety of cheap materials. Sanity pads are menstrual pads that emulate and inform their users about menstrual health worldwide. e.g. Women from Uganda use goat skin, so the sanity pad for Uganda emulated and informed about that practice.
Discussion
Data agents trigger memories and connect participants to experiences. These agents asked participants how they connected within one’s life (or in the case of sanity pads, other’s lives)
The presence of others encourages the creation of justification. (rubber ducking)
The size allowed them to be carried about, and their prominence allowed them to be conversation pieces.
Experiences that compare the person to the world or others supports higher levels of reflection.
- Type of object causes remembrance.
- Combinations of each format with personal data enable reflective thinking
- Data agents flexibility and portability through different contexts supports inter-experience relation building
- Data agent connectedness to the world enables higher levels of reflection.
Personal thoughts
The related work confused me, the idea of reflection is a complex one and so it’s reasonable to me that there would be a variety of differing papers and frameworks about it. The deluge of background work that wasn’t necessarily contradictory, but just different from one another was a bit overwhelming.
That said, the actual projects were incredibly interesting and thought provoking.
One interesting sticking point is that these objects were designed with an incredible amount of personalization and design. It required someone intelligent and someone who knew the target well (with slight exceptions in the case of project 3). As a game designer, I’m interested in how to enable reflection in games, but the issue is that I don’t know my players, nor would it be feasible to hand design something for all of them.
Google Calendar also does something interesting where if you put “watch the Red Sox game” in your calendar it’ll look up pictures of the Red Sox and make that the icon. A little bit of personalization that can be done in a “mass media” sense.
