DRS Workshop Background


This is a one-day face-to-face workshop organized as part of the Design Research Society (DRS) 2022 Conference in Bilbao, Spain. 

Through data-driven conceptions of the body and health, human bodies become assemblages of data, information flows (Dolezal and Oikkonen 2021), and data rituals (Forlano 2017) that shape everyday practices and social contexts. Having as an initial point of departure the question: What kinds of data or digital traces represent our rhythms and relationship to time and the body during the pandemic? this workshop brings together researchers to collectively explore how materializations of data traces can be used to reflect upon bodily relations to data worlds or embodied data of which we are part.

This workshop will explore this by re-engaging with data traces through knotting. Knotting has historically been a means for representing data, such as in the Quipu that were used as a data storage and archiving device and have also been explored as a means of representing data in digital form (Quart and Learner 2015). Through such alternative materializations, we aim to surface qualities of scale, intimacy and temporality within bodily relations to data.

The workshop will unpack personal experiences, stories, and emotions often homogenised or overlooked in traditional representations of data (D’Ignazio and Klein 2020). Visualising data through uncommon material form serves to defamiliarize bodily relations to data (Alfaras et al. 2020; Tsaknaki 2020). Engaging in a slow and embodied process of knotting enables new entanglements to emerge through the interplay of bodies, data and yarns (Pérez-Bustos et al. 2019). Materializing bodily data can open space for meaningful personal and social narration of our lives and help us reflect on the shifting of time horizons and scales at which we are expected to plan or deal with uncertainty and anxieties related to the body.

We invite participants to bring their bodily data traces or experiences with data, whether produced by personal devices/practices, embodied and felt, or encountered in our everyday interactions with larger institutions that gather data about us. We welcome data in many forms, both digital and analogue (from tracking data to calendars or diaries to bodily scars or pain), including any representations of routines or traces of how bodies have been living.

By re-materialising and reflecting on such data through knotting, both individually and collectively, the workshop aims to reveal messy, multiple, unpredictable, individual, and entangled moments of bodies and data. With an anchoring in feminist HCI (Bardzell 2010), this workshop aims to materialize invisible, intimate, and missing data in everyday practices and reflect on cultural norms and gendered understandings of bodies. In that, we engage with experimental ways of knowing and account for the plurality of knowledge and experiences of what it means to inhabit bodily practices, by visualizing knowledge that “comes from people as living, feeling bodies” (D’Ignazio and Klein 2020, p. 73).

The workshop thus contributes to existing HCI research unpacking relationships between bodies and data (e.g. Helms 2019; Höök 2019; Howell et al. 2019). Building upon somatic and craft approaches in HCI (Rosner 2018; Frankjær and Dalsgaard 2018; Tsaknaki and Elblaus 2019) it aims to recontextualize
bodily relations to data through shared experiences of crafting. Such feminist approaches recognize ways of knowing through material bodily practices and making that place the body into material continuity with cultural memory and undervalued feminized forms of work (Rosner 2018; Pérez-Bustos et al. 2019; Cohn 2017). We follow principles of data feminism (D’Ignazio and Klein 2020), by drawing attention to the affective and emotional labour of making data. We contribute to this by exploring how a change in material form from data visualization to knotting with thread/textile can also bring forward labour and intimacies, that otherwise stay invisible.