Challenges and Opportunities for Designing with Biodata as Material

This workshop will be held virtually on Sunday, October 25th, 2020, as part of the NordiCHI’20 Conference.

Call for Participation

The body has become a site for research in HCI and design—not just for medical or health purposes, but also for play, expression, and interpretation. A growing research strand in this direction focuses on designing with biodata. It is essential to reflect on how we understand our bodies and how we take them into account when we work with somatic experiences. As a way to discuss and reflect upon how design and HCI operate with respect to the body and its data, this one-day workshop will gather researchers whose practice uses some from of data generated from the body as material, or inspiration. The workshop will be structured around four themes relating to difference aspects of biodata:

Making sense of biodata by taking into account a holistic perspective of body, mind, and emotions, as exemplified through soma design methods in HCI, for example
Feminist perspectives of biodata that take into account bodily transitions, pluralities of bodies and differing temporalities of the body
Non-anthropocentric perspectives of working with, and making sense of biodata, to also account for microorganisms and other material agencies in our bodies
Health and affective contexts of working with data produced by bodies

This workshop will combine sharing and discussing design and reflective work that relates to biodata, and seek to generate intermediate knowledge by creating and annotated portfolio outlining the current state-of-the-art in this domain. Interested participants are invited to submit a short description of their work around biodata (2-4 pages). We welcome diverse documentation and exhibition formats including, text, images, websites, applications, or video, together with a brief motivation for what the participant hopes to achieve in the workshop. Successful applicants will be selected by their capacities to offer diverse theoretical ideas on the topic of designing and engaging with biodata, as well as their objects and systems that could drive an annotated portfolio.

To apply, please email your submission to biodata.as.material.NordiCHI20@gmail.com by September 7, 2020.

The workshop proposal paper is available here.