Maria Karyda
Data-agents
Envisaging Meaningful Representations of Personal Data as Part of Everyday Life
100470
The huge amounts of personal information that people produce daily has
encouraged them to engage with their data in creative ways through
visualizations or even physicalizations of their personal data. In this
context, the act of sense-making is one of several challenges that arise
when investigating the emotional and temporal qualities of personal
data through an experience-centric lens. This is because the way in
which people make sense of data and the way in which they make meaning
out of data are primarily personal challenges, and hence, complex to
unravel.
In this thesis, Maria Karyda focuses on
meaningfulness, the part of meaning-making that relates to feelings.
Through different projects, Karyda has aimed to discover forms,
functionalities, and spaces that meaningful repre-sentations of personal
data could inhabit in everyday life. Using an expansive Research
through Design approach, Karyda builds on the concept of data-objects, which
are affective physicalizations of personal data that resemble everyday
objects in appearance. The data-objects presented in this thesis are
intended for personal use while always considering personal data as an
inherently social phenomenon.
Read the thesis here