The Black Box speaks: Love Data Week!
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First Celebration. It is now official! We will be contributing to the CHI 2020 conference with ‘Upon Not Opening The Black Box‘ by Simy Kaur Gahoonia, Pedro Ferreira, Marisa Cohn, Line Henriksen, Katrine Meldgaard Kjær, Michael Hockenhull, Baki Cakici, Marie Blønd, Rachel Douglas-Jones, Cæcilie Sloth Laursen, Sonja Zell. By including several people as co-authors, this manifestation was one of the first attempts of collectively creating a paper from the events and workshops that have taken place in ETHOS Lab while acknowledging diverse sets of labour contributing to the project. Read about the paper and Compliance project in the blogpost by Simy Kaur Gahoonia.
The main character, the mysterious black box, in the dramaturgical paper has meanwhile become its own agent in the lab, claiming its space and opened the possibility of adding marked data to it. Have you noticed it? Have you contributed?
Second Celebration: This week (10-16 Feb 2020) is marked internationally as Love Data Week and we are contributing with a methodological experiment of giving voice to the mysterious black box from ETHOS Lab. Our methodological tool for this facilitation is the specialized medium Line Henriksen possessing the ETHOS Lab’s Twitter account marked #lovedata20.
Abstract for ‘Upon Not Opening The Black Box’
On the eve of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) coming into effect we, a university laboratory, marked the occasion with an interactive installation called Compliance. Data traces from Compliance were subsequently processed by the lab, here enacted in the form of a play. While much discussion has centered around modern ’black-boxed’ processing of data, less attention has been paid to the value of the data itself, and whether it merits use. We draw on dramaturgical methods for both analysis and presentation [15], allowing for readers to imagine staging their own, different, versions of the event. Drawing on the ambiguous ontological status of (yet unexamined) data, we offer a discussion on the value of data, its use and non-use, as well as how to live with this ambivalence, continuously negotiating social contracts about our further conduct with the data.
(15) Katri Mehto, Vesa Kantola, Sauli Tiitta, and Tomi Kankainen. 2006. Interacting with user data–Theory and examples of drama and dramaturgy as methods of exploration and evaluation in user-centered design. Interacting with computers 18, 5 (2006), 977–995.
About the ACM CHI Conference
The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems is the premier international conference of Human-Computer Interaction. CHI – pronounced ‘kai’ – is a place where researchers and practitioners gather from across the world to discuss the latest in interactive technology. We are a multicultural community from highly diverse backgrounds who together investigate and design new and creative ways for people to interact using technology.
Simy Kaur at the event ‘Compliance’ with the black box