Designing for data as a family resource through creative practices at home

Abstract

The steady adoption of data-driven devices and services into everyday living spaces enables us to interact with the intangible and invisible realm of information, transitioning us into the age of ubiquitous computing. From the ongoing developments since the 1950s, these products retain a strong focus on measurable and tangible outcomes, common rhetoric from the workplace. The result shows in products for home automation, personal safety and monitoring health, often with a lens on the individual. At home, however, efficiency and productivity are not the sole pillars of everyday living. As technology moves into this domain beyond utilitarian benefits, it faces the challenge of being adopted in the complex and multiuser domestic environment. This thesis explores how data-driven products can be better embedded in family life, particularly beyond the individual and through shared use, ownership and control. This is studied in practice to understand what qualities and characteristics, or design values, such family-focused data-driven products can embody. Building upon the benefits of do it yourself and an End User Development approach, this research consists of three key activities. A workshop studied an end user design approach to crafting physical data visualisations, used in the design, development, deployment and analysis of two extensive, family-focused, DIY data artefacts: Domestic Widgets and Phone Grown. The presented findings offer tangible takeaways and design values to engage families in a data-driven household practice. Here, data becomes a family resource to explore and support family values beyond the utility and efficiency that technology might have to offer.