About this Research Topic

Background

The digitalisation of our societies makes data ubiquitous, capturing the behaviours of individuals through products, services, and systems that they interact with. It is increasingly used by design and HCI researchers and practitioners throughout their human-centred and participatory design processes. The highly dynamic nature of behavioural data makes it deeply intertwined with people, their behaviour, and their experiences.

Data-Centric Design leverages data as material for subjective inquiry, an entry point to better understand human dynamics through deeper reflection in a research or design process. In this context, data presents unique opportunities and challenges; and practices have yet to emerge to understand how they transform the role and processes of researchers.

This Research Topic builds upon an emerging community of researchers organising workshops and special interest groups in design and HCI venues.

Through this Research Topic, we aim to map projects emerging from the community, share the messiness of research and design processes with data and surface good practices for effective and responsible use of data. The core research questions to explore through this Research Topic lie at the intersection of three axes:

Responsibility and Participation - What is beyond data privacy and open data? How can data-centric fit and challenge existing data protection regulations and ethical frameworks in practice? What methods lead to a fair exchange of values and robust insights instead of research driven by data consumption? To what extent do these approaches reinforce or mitigate existing inequalities?

Context and Expression - In which application domain can we find exemplars of data as human-centred design material? Where do we miss them? What are ways to express data as part of the human-centred design processes? How data representations influence the design (processes) and stakeholder interactions. And how can the various data modalities and materiality support fair representation and participation with data?

Tools and competencies - What is data infrastructure for design? What are data design patterns for human-centred research? How to assess data quality? How to navigate regulatorily body processes for exploratory work with personal data? What is human-centred data literacy for design? How do we teach data as material for design? What about data-enabled, data-centric, data-driven, data-informed, data-inspired, and data-aware?

Some specific themes that can be covered in this Research Topic are listed below:

- Experience in using data as design material

- Collaboration around and through data

- Responsible data practices in design and research

- Tools and competencies for designing with data

- Data to foster creativity in the design process

- Participatory, co-creative and human-centred approach with data

- Data to foster creativity in the design process

- Expressive and tangible interaction with data

- Reflexive mechanisms to understand the impact of data on human behaviour

- Feminist data practices

This Research Topic focuses on short contributions, particularly welcoming types of contributions such as perspective articles and mini-reviews. Through this approach, we want to encourage both researchers and practitioners to share their perspectives on the use of data as human-centred design material.

Keywords: Personal data, Human-Computer interaction, Human-Centred Design, Participation through data, Data Physicalisation

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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