Project purpose and development

This project took a temporal approach to explore how self tracking technologies and personal data have emerged historically, how they participate in our present and how they participate in they ways we envision ourselves and our futures. Our research focused on how users and designers of self tracking technologies engage with them in everyday life, how they imagine possible individual and societal futures with personal data and the disjunctures and similarities between these imaginaries and interrogated what this can tell us about contemporary society and anticipated futures.

Project implementation

Theoretically we built on existing understandings of the embodied, socio-technical and societal questions and relations of self tracking and personal data to develop a processual theory that can accommodate past, present and future temporalities and how these assemble, contest each other and intersect to create the circumstances in which we live. In doing so we engaged concepts of emergence, learning, knowing and imagination to create an interdisciplinary design anthropological approach to self tracking and personal data, that accounts for the sensoriality and spatiality of self tracking, the technological possibilities of self-tracking and the improvisations in self-tracking.

Our empirical research began with a three-month auto ethnographic experiment, through which we developed reflexive sensory and embodied understandings of self tracking to inform the project’s historical, contemporary, futures and design streams. A cultural history of the mirror was undertaken through library and literature research and visits to relevant historical settings. This historical perspective illuminated how the body, with the help of analogue technologies in the 17th and 18th centuries, became understood as something that could be monitored, and should be measured. This demonstrated how older technologies and practices of body monitoring have informed contemporary digital self-tracking practices. Ethnographic research into contemporary self tracking was developed through video ethnography and sensory ethnography techniques in face to face and online encounters with people who designed and used self-tracking devices in their everyday lives: in sensory and video interviews participants were showed us their use and, when relevant, taught us how to use devices and apps; ; and did participant observation at bio-hacking events. The imaged futures of self tracking were researched through sensory ethnography interviews and a design futures workshop. To understand further the logics of the design of self tracking technology we interviewed designers and performed netnographic content analyses of promotional and instructional materials, such as sales pitches, blog posts, and public presentations of self-tracking technologies.

Key results and contributions to the international research community

1. The experience of self tracking and personal data is sensory, spatial, characterised by possibility, and involves improvisation: Our sensory ethnography and design anthropological research demonstrated that in addition conscious engagement with the representational aspects of self tracking and personal data (eg data visualisations), much of people’s experience of these technologies is sensory, invisible and unspoken. As data is increasingly part of everyday environments it is experienced spatially, as part of the worlds we inhabit rather than as separate from them. In these contexts people use self tracking and personal data in ways that are meaningful to them personally and that are responsive to the contingent circumstance of their everyday lives. Research participants developed improvisatory and sometimes idiosyncratic uses of these technologies, within what was locally, culturally, socially and technologically possible. We have contributed a new sensory design anthropological approach to self tracking and personal data. This re-thinks the question of what people do with these technologies through the concepts of sensory knowing, their embeddedness in everyday environments, the possibilities they afford, and the improvisatory actions through which people engage with them as they confront the contingencies of everyday life

2. People learn with data, not from data: The research demonstrated that the assumptions underpinning research and design approaches that see self tracking as leading to behaviour change due to increased self-knowledge, improving health, and a ‘better’ life, need to be revised. We found that instead, to understand why people do or don’t use these devices, we need to consider: how they learn to live with self tracking devices within their everyday lives; how they improvise in their use of these technologies; and how personal data is attributed with meaning through embodied and emplaced pedagogies that emerge as data becomes part of people’s lives; and the implications of this for their future imaginaries. We have argued for a shift to a research approach that accounts for the experience of self tracking and personal data and re-thinks such devices as future tools for learning instead of as tools for behavioural change. We have contributed a new learning approach to self tracking and personal data which dialogues with phenomenological theories of pedagogy.

3. The ways self tracking and personal data are imagined in personal and societal futures are contested: We have found that participants in our research imagined their futures with self tracking technologies and personal data in ways that were contingent on and consistent with the different ways they had integrated these technologies into their lives. Rather than being associated with tangible future goals or to mitigate anxieties about particular future scenarios this anticipatory mode was set within the comfort of familiar daily, weekly or other known temporal routines through which learning and knowing incrementally come about. This differs from the future scenarios that form part of the logics of design and marketing that seek to engage self tracking technologies for behaviour change and self improvement. This has led to our contribution of a new temporal approach to self tracking, which dialogues with a future anthropologies approach.

New research questions generated

This project has produced a new understanding of how self tracking and personal data form part of everyday life experience, social relations and imagined and anticipated futures. It has shown how these differ from institutional logics applied to the possibilities of self tracking and personal data by policy and industry. The technological, political and everyday environments in which these technologies are used are fast changing, and since the beginning of our study emerging automated and intelligent technologies have become increasingly prominent, whereby we now face the imminent arrival of a new age of automation. In this context our research provides a fundamental understanding of how people engage with and use such technologies, this provides a baseline for and invites a new research questions about how we should confront these new technological environments and possibilities. These are:

- How will people experience, engage and improvise with self tracking and personal data as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Automated Decision Making (ADM) are increasingly implicated in their representational modes of interaction with users and their management?
- What are the ethics and responsibilities of our self tracking and personal data futures? How are the tensions between individual and institutional interests mapped out in these contexts? What human rights and regulatory frameworks need to be adopted?
- What new models and practices of user-designer roles and relationships are emerging in the production and use of self tracking and personal data, as new digital economies emerge?

The project’s international dimensions

The project has benefitted from one of the CIs being based in Australia: this enabled us to draw on Australian, as well as Swedish materials, and verify that our findings are not Sweden-specific; and has created research collaboration and co-authoring four articles with Professor Deborah Lupton, a global leader in personal data research. The project attracted collaboration with Professor Minna Ruckenstein in Finland, including one co-authored article, workshops and a seminar. The RJ funded research network Self-tracking and automatised bodies was established across Sweden, Australia and Finland, bringing the research team together with Deborah Lupton, Minna Ruckenstein and Mika Pantzar. The project team have been central to the international Data Ethnographies workshop series, which produced an online position paper and a short video from each event and included research from our project was included in the series. www.dataethnographies.com

Dissemination of results and collaboration outside the scientific community

The project has been communicated to other researchers through scientific publications, academic conferences, keynote addresses, book chapters in edited books and a co-authored book. We developed collaborations with self-tracking communities to learn with them at conferences and workshops. We organised a design futures workshop with invited experienced self trackers, designers and researchers. We participated as researchers in a bio hacking conference in Helsinki, organised a workshop for the Quantified Self conference in Amsterdam 2017, and have continued to discuss and develop ideas about possible futures for self tracking with leaders of the Quantified Self community. The project team has also presented our research at non-scientific events including technology start-up events and cultural institutions.