Ambiguity as a Design Resource for Self-tracking Wearables

Workshop Description

Commercial fitness and wellness wearable trackers promise to help people become “better versions” of themselves. They do so by prescribing “healthier” behaviours supported by data-driven insights presented as apparently objective numbers, graphs, and scores. Within this framing, walking, running, breathing, sleeping and even meditating become performative acts. Computable and, therefore, improvable.

However, self-tracking data are not neutral mirrors of the self. They depend on how signals are sensed, processed, and translated into metrics and representations. These design choices shape what becomes visible, how it is interpreted, and which behaviours are encouraged, while often concealing the uncertainty embedded in measurement and interpretation. As a result, uncertainty can be compressed into single values and fixed interpretations, even to the point of promoting a one-size-fits-all idea of what “better” looks like.

This workshop starts from a critical perspective on this dominant paradigm in self-tracking wearables design and asks: how can we design wearables and data representations that support multiple interpretations and reflective engagement?
To do so, the workshop draws on ambiguity as a design resource: a way to acknowledge uncertainty, open meaning-making, and enable more open-ended relationships with self-tracking. Working in small teams, students will analyze existing self-tracking technologies and their data representations and identify where prescription is built into current designs. They will then strategically apply ambiguity tactics to reduce or amplify prescription in order to surface uncertainty, invite reflection, and open space for meaning-making. The workshop culminates in a concept for an ambiguous-by-design wearable and/or data representation, presented as a physical and/or digital fictional product or service.

Educational Goal

• How do self-tracking wearable technologies work (roughly)?
• What do self-tracking wearables’ data representations make visible, and what do they conceal?
• How can ambiguity be leveraged as a design resource in practice?
• How to balance openness and prescription in personal data representation design?

What you need for this workshop

Bring a laptop, pen, and paper. If you already own a wearable fitness/health tracker, bring it (ideally, one device per team to examine). Bring low-fidelity prototyping materials for the ideation phase.

Requirements

Basic design skills are recommended. No coding/physical computing skills required (the prototype does not need to be necessarily functional or interactive; it can be illustrative and conveyed through Wizard-of-Oz techniques or fictional mock-ups). Prior personal experience with wearables/self-tracking is helpful but not necessary.

Where is it located?

H 1.22