Interview II Interviewees
Shannon Mattern (an associate professor in the School of Media Studies at The New School) Grace Jun (a part-time faculty at Parsons School of Design, Open Style Lab) Nelesi Rodriguez (Media Studies Alumni, who did her thesis research on Quantified Self)
Identify and contact an expert subject requesting an interview.
Shannon Mattern Shannon Mattern is Media Studie associate professor at The New School. Her teaching and research address relationships between the forms and materialities of media and the spaces -- architectural, urban, and conceptual -- they create and inhabit. She has written about libraries and archives, media companies' headquarters, place branding, public design projects, urban media art, media acoustics, media infrastructures, and material texts. My initial interests in quantified self and self-monitoring were inspired by one of Shannon’s writing “Mission Control: A History of the Urban Dashboard.” Shannon is currently teaching Bookshelves to Big Data: Archaeology of Knowledge and Maps as Media at the New School.
Grace Jun Grace Jun is a designer and creative technologist. She is best known for her leading role at Open Style Lab (OSL) as a researcher in wearable tech for inclusive design solutions and adaptive fashion. She teaches at The Parsons School of Design in the Arts, Media & Technology program and the BFA School of Fashion. She is one of an expertise practitioner in the intersection of material, textile and computational fashion design, so I interviewed her to listen to her opinions about my thesis concept and technical advice for working with smart-textile.
Nelesi Rodriguez Nelesi Rodriguez is a media educator, researcher, and practitioner. Her brilliant thesis research on quantified self: “The Question of the Subject in Times of the Quantified Self” gave me huge insight by narrating the history, political and socioeconomic aspects of self-tracking and Quantified Self movement that are often called as sousveillance.
Interview II Write a brief bio of the subject, focusing on details that relate to your thesis work. While it still sticks with the initial concept of wearing self-data by visualizing individual’s daily data on wearable items, there have been some significant changes regarding context and implementing a final design output within my project. I have been thinking and exploring on my idea of wearing data with following key questions like: “why wear data?” “which data will be visualized?” “who are the users who are willing to use it?” “what would be specific contexts that people need or use it?” My first attempt to embody this idea was accompanied with critiques of our quantified self which posed an existential question about our quantified, datafied life. For my thesis, I have changed my position as a designer to address this issues by showing examples of utilizing quantified self-data in more creative and positive ways, instead of just criticizing the quantified self-movement itself obsessed with numbers. By going through those questions and trying to narrow my concept down to specific contexts, I have clarified my concept as “a customized textile design generated by self-data, which can be fashionable.” (When I did this interview in October, my concept was not yet settled down to a customized fashion. So I discussed those question of “why, which, who, what and how” for finding contexts and reasoning with the interviewees.)
Overall Questions 1) How do you think about the concept phrase of “Wearable Self, Wearable Data?” 2) Are you usually concerning about your health data? Are you using wearable devices? 3) Do you think quantification of our lifestyle can motivate us to improve our health and wellness? 4) How do you think about data ownership in the age of Internet of Things? 5) My project reflects the trend of quantification of our modern life at the same time standing for our data ownership. How do you think about quantified self-movement such as self-tracking, self-surveillance by using wearable devices? What will be the pros and cons of the behaviors of self-tracking? 6) How do you think about wearing location-based mapping on our body? 7) How do you feel about a connected dashboard with our body? 8) Do you concern about your own data? If you imagine you wear your personal information or data, what kinds of data do you want to wear and show? 9) I’m reading your book “Deep Mapping The City” and thinking how to make an interaction, how do you think the correlation of walking and mapping. 10) Do you think my project has a criticality? What kinds of critical thinking I need to dig into more? 11) How to make a meaningful interaction by using self-focused personal data- how can I make other people empathize or engage with my project? 12) Any other thesis advice?
Interview II Shannon Mattern Write a narrative of your most important take-aways. How has this expert informed your work?
[Shannon] “I have been exploring the topic of quantified self. Just like any technologies, It has both positive and negative consequences. I think that is certainly empowering people to look into the details of our life because obviously, we have limited visibility to know what’s going on inside our bodies because our bodies are where kind like a technological black box. Through all these crazy algorithms like processing, machines working inside of it, so we can’t know all intimately. But In order to exactly know what’s happening inside, we have externalized it, and that can be through data. There are other historical ways that are a externalizing internal operations by visualization. For instance, Chinese medical therapy is based on listening to the resonance of the body. It’s not just something quantified but the materialized form of data. The resonance of our body generates data that can tell you about useful information such as your health or patterns of our lives. So I think knowing more about what’s going on inside of us or relying on external devices that would be measurement tools or experts in different fields like doctors can empower us so that we may measure small scales kind of time frame changes and see how we live. For instance, during a cup of coffee can also affect your heart rate or something very small like that. That can be empowering the small moments of our life. Now the technology allows us to be able to measure almost every possible movements in our lives. So to speak, life, existence, the joy of living, Our reason for being, walking on the earth can be translated into streams of measurable, streams of empirical data.”
[Me] Do you think quantification of the life enhances your health? When I asked Shannon about her own experience of self-tracking, She says that when it comes to health issues, it’s just how she feels about her body, not quantified data. For her, internal familiarity is more believable than measurement of data.
[Me] I had been trying to make a practical product that motivates people to maintain healthier lifestyle by data, but I confronted some criticism that people’s lifestyle are not modified by checking their quantified data. What’s your opinions about the practical use of wearable devices and the quantified self-movement?
[Shannon] “There are so many different elements that have impact on our health in the matter of our health is not just defined by several measurements. Even multiple specialists looking at our bodies cannot really find a rational explanations why we exactly have sudden problems in our bodies. But in that cases, there are so many facts that our physical activity data can tell you because data is always within the parameters of health.”
Interview II [Me] How do you think about wearing location-based mapping on our body? [Shannon] “I think it’s not just about location related data; it’s more about situation that affects people’s emotional or physical states. We can see examples like Feltron report. It’s also like an analog dashboard in a way. It’s a kind of a visual representation to measure it just because the data can be measured, not for practical, medical purposes whether or not they provide useful information. So It will be interesting to transform quantified self-movement into parody and another way to utilize it, not for wellness intervention. Also, it’s a kind of surveillance possibility in terms of self-surveillance.”
The Most Important Take-away Shannon suggested me a custom designed dashboard that is not just representing data by displaying graphs, but also shows some sort of insights like suggestions, recommendations or hidden patterns of our lives by looking at it. She said that the dashboard could be a couple of different versions depending on each user and the show how different users might want to get different output. Also their personalities, lifestyle can be relevant to their own daily data. As an opposite example, Shannon suggested me to imagine a couple of different user scenario, and then, intentionally incorporate each data that is totally irrelevant for making speculative design or parody. I take Shannon’s point that the dashboard (interface) can be various versions based on different users’ contexts. Beyond urban dashboards that control and surveil our lives from power elites, on the contrary, my thesis will stand for each person’s individuality by allowing people to customize the visualized patterns generated by their own data. Further work in my thesis will claim “everyone is creating each unique trace of the life that can be visualized, highlighted and memorized.” Digital fabrication, open sources, and self-tracking technologies enable us to generate, utilize our own data. My thesis has its criticality by representing that development which enables us to wear our own self-data that visualizes each individual's uniqueness.
Grace Jun In a recent short interview with Grace, I showed her a dashboard prototype that shows people’s obsession with health data. A controversial issue was what is the particular context of the data for my thesis. She posed some critical questions like what am I questioning as creative technologist through my thesis, why am I looking at data of body. She argued those questions are the most important and I should find out what kinds of contexts and what kinds of data that you will explore. She said that I need to specify what kind of data will be components of visualization. Also, she claims that data has an opinion and creates bias because even with data, there is assumption and perception that people would see by numbers and graphics. She asked me how I make the data interesting but also give some insights and suggested me, in case I make a speculative art, to make it exaggerated in a joking way and it needs to be really accurate and visible.
Interview II Nelesi Rodriguez During the interview, we talked about her thesis research which pose a critical question: How are digital self-tracking practices shaping the contemporary notion of self and how does this notion relate to concepts of self from previous times? Nelesi also tells me a story about how she started to be interested in quantified self and her experience of attending Quantified Self meetup in the city to gave me advice to maker a user scenario by looking at their stories. While most of the people in the quantified self group focus on increasing productivity by using self-tracking tools, there are a few other interesting attempts to utilize the data in a different way. She suggested me to attend Quantified Self community meetup or conference. Throughout the years, the QS (Quantified Self) community has grown and gained some visibility, to the extent that today the term Quantified Self is the default name journalists use to refer to digital self-tracking practices. Although it is true that this phenomenon has a strong quantitative focus –the QS slogan is “self-knowledge through numbers”–, not all the people who quantify themselves consider themselves to be part of QS. Moreover, there are plenty of individuals within the self-tracking domains trying to achieve self-knowledge through means other than numbers. Her own experience with self-tracking yields a point that is similar to mine. What I take away from my own experience with self-tracking is to find hidden patterns of life, so I tried to optimize my lifestyle by awaring of invisible factors of my life by identifying things that are correlated each other. Like me, she used Reporter app before to record her daily life. Reporter is a self-tracking app launched by Nicholas Felton and Drew Breuning. Nicholas Felton is famous as a designer who completed beautiful examples of self-tracking data visualization “Feltron Report” for several years. The Reporter app is not just a tracking app. It enables us sampling our daily lifestyle randomly. It’s more about customizable. When I looked at some reviews about the app, some users say like this: “I love them. I am obsessed by numbers and use spreadsheets on my MacBook for fun,” while others say this app shows qualification of life instead of quantification. Nelesi told me that recent critiques to digital self-tracking address how users of commercial apps and wearables can be limited by their lack of programming and statistical skills –in the case of health-related apps, for instance, a survey done by the Economist Intelligence Unit cited in a report by PWC showed that 67% of users quit within the first six months of usage, mainly because they feel incapable of making sense of the data or converting it into beneficial actions.Users and journalists have also demonstrated how cultural and personal biases can be imprinted in the algorithms of commercial self-tracking apps that impose standardized and normative views of the self. We also discussed what a better self is. She cited a well-known French philosopher Michel Foucault’s “technologies of self,” which permit individuals to effect by their own means or with help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a
Interview II certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality. Her opinion toward this definition is digital self-tracking could be considered a contemporary technology of the self. From the interview with Nelesi, I registered the annual Quantified Self conference held in Amsterdam and New York to show my thesis work there. Also, I have realized I need to make multiple questionnaires to users on the web application to categorize their lifestyles or characteristic to reflect it to the final visualizations. I will make the algorithm super easy but absolutely critical. Like Reporter app, it will allow questions to take answers in the form of a number, a multiple choice, yes/no, a location, people, or just a text string, and charts each question’s answers according to their type.