SIGCHI Outstanding Dissertation Award - A Quantified Past.

A 'data-driven life' has become an established feature of present and future technological visions. This dissertation interrogates the human experience of a data-driven life, by conceptualising, investigating, and speculating about personal informatics tools as new technologies of memory. I argue that the prevalence of quantified data and metrics is creating fundamentally new and distinct records of everyday life: a 'quantified past'. To address this, I conducted qualitative and idiographic fieldwork -- with long-term self-trackers, and subsequently with users of 'smart journals' -- to investigate how this data-driven record mediates the experience of remembering. Further, I undertook a speculative and design-led inquiry to explore the context of a 'quantified wedding'. Adopting a context where remembering is centrally valued, this Research through Design project demonstrated opportunities for the design of data-driven tools for remembering. Crucially, while speculative, this project maintained a central focus on individual experience, and introduced an innovative methodological approach 'Speculative Enactments' for engaging participants meaningfully in speculative inquiry.