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The processes of data collection and transformation are often opaque to users. This means they rely on their imagination to make sense of the data they produce. The images data conjure up, however, tend to be homogenous and flat: black screens, ones and zeros, big server farms in the desert. For designers and researchers who work with data as a material, this small repertoire can be stifling. For device users, it can lead to a removal of agency in how they make sense and engage with the data they produce. In this pictorial, we draw from a two-year data fictionalization project to start building an expanded repertoire of data imaginaries. We worked with seven households and seven writers to transform smart home data sets into fiction stories. Based on the interviews we conducted, we present the images participants shared with us as a step towards more expressive and varied imaginaries of data. 

We present the Inner Ear: a porcelain device that both captures and represents data. In particular, we focus on sensing vibrations—for their hidden yet omnipresent qualities in domestic environments. We designed the Inner Ear in response and in contrast to a growing collection of ‘always on and recording’ smart home devices. With the Inner Ear, we purposefully let participants choose when to capture vibrations and which capture should be physicalized. In this pictorial, we describe the design and fabrication process of the capturing device as well as the data physicalization workflow. We contribute insights on (1) the design rationale and development of a double function artifact (to both capture and represent), as well as (2) design decisions involved in balancing legibility with leaving room for meaning making during the transcription of home vibration data. 

Documentary filmmaking is inherently subjective. The filmmaking team decides when to film, how to angle the camera, how to edit, and what narrative to put forward. At the same time, documentary filmmaking has a capacity for sharing people's experiences, expressing emotion, and foregrounding context through image, sound, and movement. In this paper, we discuss the tensions with using documentary filmmaking as a method for documentation as well as dissemination in design research. We present our approach to creating a series of 12 documentary shorts in the context of the Inner Ear project. The Inner Ear is a data physicalization project that invites participants to capture vibrations in their homes, which are then materialized as porcelain sculptures. We articulate the pressures and uncertainties of filming, and the responsibility of building narrative through editing. Finally, we discuss the generative but conflicting goals of combining research documentation with public dissemination via documentary filmmaking. 

While data are the backbone for home Internet of Things’ (IoT) functional and economic model, data remain elusive and abstract for home dwellers. In response, we present the Odd Interpreters (OIs): a collection of three artifacts that materialize alternative ways of engaging with IoT data in home environments. The OIs recast home data as imaginative sounds (Broadcast), fading fabric (Soft Fading), and cookie recipes (Data Bakery) with the intent to reveal the hidden human labor and material infrastructures of data and to critique data's assumed objectivity. Following a Research-through-Design approach, we unpack design events that mark our process for making the Odd Interpreters. We conclude with a discussion around the need for pluralizing data encounters, the tactic of designing between illusion and precision, and a reflection on living with the prototypes while designing. 

This one-day workshop will bring together a diverse group of practitioners and researchers within the CHI community to discuss and explore data's increasing use as a material for design. This workshop encourages the submission of design exemplars, i.e., physical or digital works (in progress), design processes, or provocative or controversial pieces on the topic of data as a design material. If we are to continue to explore what data means as a design material and how we will continue to co-exist with them in our everyday lives through new and exciting ways and means, we must develop new strategies, tactics, tools, and outcomes. By bringing together products, processes, and provocations, this workshop will nurture and extend the continuation of research inquiring into data as a design material in its many forms. Our workshop will be conducted through physical and digital activities before, during, and after the onsite event at CHI 2023. 

Given decades of Human computer interaction (HCI) research focused on scientific empiricism, it can be hard for the field to acknowledge that data analysis is both an emotional and speculative process. But what does it mean for this process of data analysis to embrace its situated and speculative nature? In this paper, we explore this possibility by building on decades of HCI mixed methods that root data analysis in design. Drawing on an autoethnographic design inquiry, we examine how data analysis can work as an implicating process, one that is not only critically grounded in a designer’s own situation but also offers modes of imagining the world otherwise. In this analysis, we find that autobiographical design can help HCI scholars to respond to current critiques of speculative design by grounding and rendering more personal certain kinds of speculation, opening a space for diverse voices to emerge. 

Over the past decade, the growth of voice assistants has presented new challenges within domestic life. Prior research has shown that such technologies affect users unevenly or fail to account for some relationships and domesticities entirely. Our work investigates the under-examined topic of queerness at home. Drawing on the experience of queer breakup, we describe a design inquiry and a first-person research approach exploring two concurrent relationships in separate households both using Alexa. We explore issues of temporality, glitch, and shared accountability. We also ask critical questions with audio experiments, including: How do voice assistants differentiate between queer voices? How should we converse with voice assistants about queerness? And are voice assistants “queer enough”? We contribute a discussion of difference, inclusion, and queer cultures of adversarial use to highlight the limitations of both everyday and professional language for describing and analyzing the particulars of queerness and interaction design. 

Smart home cameras present new challenges for understanding behaviors and relationships surrounding always-on, domestic recording systems. We designed a series of discursive activities involving 16 individuals from ten households for six weeks in their everyday settings. These activities functioned as speculative probes prompting participants to reflect on themes of privacy and power through filming with cameras in their households. Our research design foregrounded critical-playful enactments that allowed participants to speculate potentials for relationships with cameras in the home beyond everyday use. We present four key dynamics with participants and home cameras by examining their relationships to: the camera’s eye, filming, their data, and camera’s societal contexts. We contribute discussions about the mundane, information privacy, and post-hoc reflection with one’s camera footage. Overall, our findings reveal the camera as a strange, yet banal entity in the home—interrogating how participants compose and handle their own and others’ video data. 

The increased adoption of smart home cameras (SHCs) foregrounds issues of surveillance, power, and privacy in homes and neighborhoods. However, questions remain about how people are currently using these devices to monitor and surveil, what the benefits and limitations are for users, and what privacy and security tensions arise between primary users and other stakeholders. We present an empirical study with 14 SHC users to understand how these devices are used and integrated within everyday life. Based on semistructured qualitative interviews, we investigate users’ motivations, practices, privacy concerns, and social negotiations. Our findings highlight the SHC as a perceptually powerful and spatially sensitive device that enables a variety of surveillant uses outside of basic home security—from formally surveilling domestic workers, to casually spying on neighbors, to capturing memories. We categorize surveillant SHC uses, clarify distinctions between primary and non primary users, and highlight under-considered design directions for addressing power imbalances among primary and non-primary users. 

In this paper, we use fiction as a method to complicate the commonplace narratives of data as intangible and objective, in the particular context of Internet of Things (IoT) in the home. We, a team of two design researchers, partnered with a fiction writer and a single IoT enthusiast, Susan, to create The Data Epics: four short stories based on Susan's monthly home IoT data logs. The Data Epics revealed new imaginaries for data, showing new world-views and lively data, but also surfaced data's entanglement in meshes and hierarchies, and concerns about control and power. Our work also examines the labor of tending to and interpreting data and a particular interest in anomalies. We conclude with discussions of how data imaginaries from fiction might be imperfect, but are uniquely generative, offering a path to get closer to IoT data by trying things on and zooming in and slowing down.