Speculative Designs for Emergent Personal Data Trails: Signs, Signals and Signifiers

As networked sensing technologies continue to infiltrate new corners of the built environment, innocuous daily activities -turning on a light, streaming TV, commuting- increasingly create personal data trails. Assisting users in negotiating permissions for services and managing known personal data trails is currently a significant design challenge. However, as this landscape is rapidly evolving year by year, what is urgently needed is for designers to speculate, ideate and design for emergent and near-future data trails. This one-day workshop will bring together a wide range of researchers, practitioners and designers working in areas such as smart cities, smart homes, responsible research & innovation, surveillance, privacy, IoT, smart energy and beyond, in order to ideate and design around emergent personal data trails. The intended outcome of the workshop is to co-create a suite of signs, signals and signifiers with the purpose of acquainting and empowering users to navigate and manage these types of data.