Stanford Seminar - Data Imaginaries

February 3, 2023 Audrey Desjardins of University of Washington 0s and 1s on a screen. The Cloud. Fast moving. Clean. Efficient. Exponentially growing. Data Centers. Code on the black screen of a terminal window. Buzzing. Such images construct part of commonly shared imaginaries around data. As data increasingly become part of the most intimate parts of people's lives (often at home), it remains a largely invisible phenomenon. In particular, one of the leading challenges currently facing Internet of Things (IoT) is algorithmic transparency and accountability with regards to how IoT data are collected, what is inferred and who they are shared with. From a home dweller's perspective, data may be available for review and reflection via graphs, spreadsheets, and dashboards (if at all available!). In this talk, I instead argue for other modes of encountering IoT data: ways that are creative, critical, subtle, performative, and at times analog or fictional. By translating data into ceramic artifacts, performance and interactive installation experiments, fiction stories, imagined sounds, faded fabric, and even data cookies, I show a diversity of approaches for engaging data that might capture people's attention and imagination. As a result, this work uncovers ways to make data more real, showing its messiness and complexities, and opens questions about how data might be interpreted, and by whom. About the speaker: Audrey Desjardins is an interaction designer who speculatively and critically examines how people live with technology. She designs interactive artifacts and systems that reimagine the familiar co-existence of humans and things. Her current projects touch on ways to inquire and reclaim Internet of Things data through crafting and materializing ways of living with that data. As a design scholar, she believes that the design and making of artifacts is a rich site of knowledge production. She designs to articulate questions, to propose alternatives and to provoke