A Notebook of Data Imaginaries
Best Paper Award
A Notebook of Data Imaginaries is an award-winning project that explores how people imagine, interpret, and give meaning to the data they produce in their everyday lives. The project builds on the Data Epics, a two-year data fictionalization initiative where fiction writers crafted short stories based on smart home datasets. While data is often presented as abstract, neutral, and objective—reduced to numbers and charts—this project reveals a more complex and expressive landscape of data imaginaries: the mental images, metaphors, and sensory associations people develop when they think about data.
Through interviews and creative exercises with participants, the project captures a diverse and textured vocabulary of data representation, moving beyond the typical imagery of glowing screens and server farms. Participants were asked to describe data through sensory and imaginative prompts: What does data feel like? What friends does data make? Where does data hide? Their answers ranged from the tactile (glass beads, slime, braille) to the poetic (a whisper, a chameleon, a secret in the shadows), reflecting a rich sensorial and affective dimension of data that traditional visualizations often overlook.
Using sketches, illustrations, and collages, the Notebook visually represents these expanded imaginaries, offering an alternative way to engage with data beyond charts and dashboards. This work contributes to ongoing discussions in HCI, speculative design, and data visualization, advocating for a more interpretative, imaginative, and participatory approach to data representation—one that acknowledges the multiple ways people experience, understand, and relate to data in their daily lives.
Gabrielle Benabdallah, Maya A Kaneko, and Audrey Desjardins. 2023. A Notebook of Data Imaginaries. In Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 431–445. https://doi.org/10.1145/3563657.3596025 Best Paper Award
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