On Data Imaginaries

Conversation with Audrey Desjardins

Join us for an hour of conversation about Data-Centric Design with Audrey Desjardins. For the second conversation of this season, we’ll dive into ‘Data Imaginaries’ and particularly subjectivity, physicality, and interpretation.

  • When: On June 6th, 2023, 17:00 (CEST)
  • Where:
    • In person: TU Delft Campus, IDE Arena Free Snacks and Drinks!
    • Online: Link
  • Recording Coming soon!

A few words about Audrey - Trained as an industrial designer and interaction design researcher, Audrey Desjardins uses design as a way to critically reflect on people’s creative tactics to make, adapt, and transform their homes and to investigate potential futures in domestic spaces. She is an Associate Professor of Interaction Design in the School of Art + Art History + Design at the University of Washington, and adjunct associate professor in Human-Centered Design and Engineering and DXARTS. She is the founder and director of Studio Tilt, a design research studio.


Reflection by Interaction

Conversation with Marit Bentvelzen

Join us for an hour of conversation about Data-Centric Design with Marit Bentvelzen. To kickstart this new season of conversations, we’ll dive into ‘Reflection by Interaction’ or how technology can support users in reflecting on personal data.

  • When: On May 25th, 2023, 12:30 (CEST)
  • Where:
    • In person: TU Delft Campus, Building 32 (IDE), Studio 17 Free Lunch!
    • Online: Link
  • Recording

A few words about Marit - Driven by an interest in the intersection of technology and human experience, she is currently pursuing a PhD in Human Computer Interaction at Utrecht University. With a focus on personal informatics systems, her research explores how technology can foster reflection on personal data. Her current fascination lies in understanding the impact that the design of metrics has on users’ perception of themselves and their overall health and well-being. By examining how metrics shape individuals’ self-perception, she aims to develop insights that can guide the creation of more meaningful and user-centered personal informatics interfaces.


Data as Human-Centred Design Material

Join us at CHI ‘23, on April 26th from 11:10 to 12:35, for an exciting discussion during the SIG on Data as Human-Centred Design Material!

Check out the CHI program.

What will we discuss?

👉 Responsibility, Participation, and Reciprocity - What is beyond data privacy and open data? How can data-centric fit and challenge existing data protection regulations and ethical frameworks in practice? What methods lead to a fair exchange of values and robust insights instead of research driven by data consumption? To what extent do these approaches reinforce or mitigate existing inequalities?

👉 Tools and Competencies - What is data infrastructure for design? What are data design patterns for human-centred research? How to assess data quality? How to navigate regulatorily body processes for exploratory work with personal data? What is human-centred data literacy for design? How do we teach data as material for design? What about data-enabled, data-centric, data-driven, data-informed, data-inspired, and data-aware?

👉 Context and Expression - In which application domain can we find exemplars of data as human-centred design material? Where do we miss them? What are ways to express data as part of the human-centred design processes? How data representations influence the design (processes) and stakeholder interactions. And how can the various data modalities and materiality support fair representation and participation with data?

Help us inform the discussion with interesting papers and activities related to Data and Design from CHI ‘23 and beyond!

👉 Add your papers to our virtual gallery via the form and check out the 👀 gallery of publications

👉 Add your activities to the schedule via the form and check out the 👀 full schedule

The SIG is co-organised by Alejandra Gómez Ortega, Peter Lovei, Renee Noortman, Romain Toebosch, Albrecht Kurze, Mathias Funk, Sandy Gould, Samuel Huron, Alex Bowyer and Jacky Bourgeois.


Making with Data

Conversation with Samuel Bowyer


Understanding and Designing Human Data Relations

Conversation with Alex Bowyer

Alex Bowyer is a researcher and software engineer from North East England who has recently finished his PhD thesis at Newcastle University specialising in ‘Understanding and Improving Human Data Relations’. This Digital Civics research bridges participatory design, HCI, UX, social science and computer science. His research explores the power imbalance caused by organisations (in both public and private sector) holding personal data about service users, creating problems of access, representation, control and reduced accountability. Through legal routes such as GDPR requests and adversarial design approaches such as web extensions and data flow auditing, he now works to try and help individuals and collectives take control of their data and pressure digital service providers for better data rights and fairer treatment. He is currently working a s a senior software engineer at Hestia.ai, a Swiss company specialising in building tools and delivering training on how to obtain and make sense of one’s personal data. Hestia works with disadvantaged groups such as Uber drivers, helping them gather data to demand fairer treatment from their employers, or better rights as users.

You can read more about Alex’s research at:

He can be found on Twitter at @alexbfree.