Designers and HCI researchers from industry and academia have been exploring the opportunities that emerge from incorporating behavioral data into the design process. For this, designers employ and combine data from multiple sources, multiple scales, and types to obtain valuable insights that inform and support design decisions. This combination unfolds through interdisciplinary collaborations, enabled by various methods and approaches, including participatory data analysis, sense-making interviews, co-design workshops, and data storytelling. However, due to the personal nature of behavioral data and the open-ended, iterative approach of Human-Centered Design, data-centric design activities clash with current HCI and data science practices. As both industry and academia increasingly use data-centric design processes, we recognize a need to share both examples and experiences to reinforce that most practices (and failed experiences) do not yet emerge solely from the literature. In this Special Interest Group, we aim to provide a space for design, data, and HCI researchers and practitioners to connect, reflect on the current practices, and explore potential approaches to further integrating behavioral data into design activities.
This workshop paper contributed to the UbiComp ‘21 workshop SensiBlend, ‘Sensing Blended Experiencesin Professional and Social Contexts’.
In-the-wild research allows the HCI community to gain insights into personal behaviour and characteristics. For designers and researchers, this means having access to rich spatiotemporal insights reflecting user’s characteristics, behaviours, and needs. However, designerly contexts require contextualized and meaningful data, and collecting it in-the-wild involves a great effort. In addition, ethical implications need to be considered. In this paper, we propose designerly data donation, a participatory approach for data collection in-the-wild, as an effective and ethical way to enable data-centric design processes. We present the potential benefits of designerly data donation around three axes: value gain, data contextualization, and roles and relationships. And we introduce the challenges of designerly data donation at the intersection of HCI, UbiComp, and design.