Data Badges: Making an Academic Profile through a DIY wearable physicalisation

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Georgia Panagiotidou, Sinem Görücü, Andrew Vande Moere

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 View presentation:2021-10-27T15:15:00ZGMT-0600Change your timezone on the schedule page
2021-10-27T15:15:00Z

Exemplar figure, described by caption below — Data Badges are customisable wearable physicalisations that express participant academic profiles in professional events. The canvas and encoded tokens are designed to be modular, interlocking and simple to attach so as to be assembled directly by participants on site using an instruction sheet. The DIY assembling of the Data Badges, allowed for a unique ice-breaker and permitted the appropriation of the physical tokens in personally comfortable and creative ways. The image depicts a Data Badge on a backdrop of its instruction sheet.

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Abstract

In this pictorial, we present the design and making process of Data Badges as they were deployed during a one-week academic seminar. Data Badges are customizable physical conference badges that invite participants to make their own independent and personalized expressions of their academic profile by choosing and assembling a collection of predefined physical tokens on a flat wearable canvas. As our modular and intuitive design approach allows the construction to occur as a shared, collective activity, Data Badges take advantage of the creative, affective, and social values that underlie physicalization and its construction to engage participants in reflecting on personal data. Among other unexpected phenomena, we noticed how the freedom of assembly and interpretation encouraged a variety of appropriations, which expanded its intended representational space from fully representative to more resistive and provocative forms of data expression.