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Luke Haliburton, Beat Rossmy, Albrecht Schmidt, Ceenu George
An Exploration of Hidden Data: Identifying and Physicalizing Personal Virtual Data to Extend Co-located Communication
In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Media (MUM '23). ACM. New York, NY, USA. 2023. https://doi.org/10.1145/3626705.3627788. (bib)

Communication is crucial for interpersonal connection, but sometimes we simply cannot find the right words. Some data, such as complex emotions, are either hard to quantify or are otherwise difficult to communicate. We have access to numerous personal statistics from quantified self devices, but hidden data are either untracked or require abstraction. In this paper, we explore physicalizations to communicate hidden data between couples. We recruited six couples (N=12 participants, 163 telegram responses) to participate in a two-week sensitization diary study followed by two participatory co-design sessions. We then hosted a one-day expert prototyping workshop (N=5) to create tangible artifacts based on the findings of the participatory phase. By iterating on the topic in three ways, we contribute (i) a design framework for understanding and tangibly representing hidden data, (ii) a discussion on the appropriateness of these methodologies, and (iii) open research questions to guide future research in the field.