From Fitbit to Apple Watch to sensors embedded in walls, furniture, and underwear, an amassing amount of biosensory data about people's bodies, behaviors, thoughts, and feelings presents sense-making challenges and opportunities. While prevalent approaches leverage data analysis to promote individual productivity and normative wellness, my design research contributes alternative design tactics for engaging biosensory data to more effectively support social, embodied, and emotional meaning-making. I will demonstrate this concept through two projects. The first, color-changing garment Ripple, explores how ambiguity can be a valuable design tactic for inviting open-ended social emotional reflection. I created ordinary-looking shirts with embedded biosensors and display elements, and studied how pairs of friends interpreted the display throughout their daily lives. My second project, the Heart Sounds Bench, explores life-affirmation as an alternative design frame for public sensing. I created a bench that amplifies the live unfiltered heart sounds of bench-sitters, and studied how pairs of strangers experienced listening to their heart sounds emanate into the environment. Through this, I envision critically reworking conceptions of sensing and data to support different ways of knowing.

face  Speaker: Noura Howell  

Biografia: Noura Howell is a Ph.D. candidate at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley, with a Designated Emphasis in New Media. Her design research is situated at the intersection of human-computer interaction and new media interactive art. Her work has been published at premier venues in human-computer interaction, such as CHI (Computer-Human Interaction, also known as Human Factors in Computing Systems), CSCW (Computer Supported Cooperative Work), and DIS (Designing Interactive Systems). She has been awarded a Cota Robles Fellowship and other awards and grants from groups such as the Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity and the Center for Technology, Society, and Policy. Through building interactive sensing technologies and studying people's experiences around these artifacts, her research contributes alternative design tactics for supporting emotional meaning-making with biosensory data.