Imagining Data-Objects for Reflective Self-Tracking

Abstract: While self-tracking data is typically captured real-time in a lived experience, the data is often stored in a manner detached from the context where it belongs. Research has shown that there is a potential to enhance people's lived experiences with data-objects (artifacts representing contextually relevant data), for individual and collective reflections through a physical portrayal of data. This paper expands that research by studying how to design contextually relevant data-objects based on people's needs. We conducted a participatory research project with five households using object theater as a core method to encourage participants to speculate upon combinations of meaningful objects and personal data archives. In this paper, we detail three aspects that seem relevant for designing data-objects: social sharing, contextual ambiguity and interaction with the body. We show how an experience-centric view on data-objects can contribute with the contextual, social and bodily interplay between people, data and objects.