IS Breakfast Series- Vera Khovanskaya Chi Practice Talk

The Information Science Breakfast Series is a seminar-style meeting held one morning a week. The Series provides a venue to share, discover, and discuss research happening in Information Science. It is intended to be a less formal environment; and practice talks, works in progress, and elicitations for feedback on early-stage ideas are all welcome forms of presentation. 

Undergraduate student Vera Khovanskaya will be delivering a CHI practice talk this week.

Title: “Everybody Knows What You’re Doing”: A Critical Design Approach to Personal Informatics

Abstract: We present an alternative approach to the design of personal informatics systems: instead of motivating people to examine their own behaviors, this approach promotes awareness of and reflection on the infrastructures behind personal informatics and the modes of engagement that they promote. Specifically, this paper presents an interface that displays personal web browsing data. The interface aims to reveal underlying infrastructure using several methods: drawing attention to the scope of mined data by displaying deliberately selected sensitive data, using purposeful malfunction as a way to encourage reverse engineering, and challenging normative expectations around data mining by displaying information in unconventional ways. Qualitative results from a two-week deployment show that these strategies can raise people’s awareness about data mining, promote efficacy and control over personal data, and inspire reflection on the goals and assumptions embedded in infrastructures for personal data analytics.