Understanding the challenges of using personal data in media experiences

This thesis explores the challenges associated with the turn to personal data in novel media experiences. Emergent media experiences, is turning towards using personal data as a resource to help enhance the possibilities for innovation in media service provision. But while the capabilities presented by personal data are manifold here, historically this shift has seen to introduce many socio-technical challenges that confront the use of these experiences. It is the study and understanding of these challenges, as manifest within the scope of media experiences leveraging personal data that this research turns to. The research studies this problem from the perspective of two stakeholders involved in this scenario, the users and the service providers. Here, an overtly multidisciplinary approach is adopted, starting from the literature review which engages with previous work from the disciplines of media research, technology, digital economy, law and ethics. To do this, a range of methods which support qualitative research like informal interviews, focus groups, scenario based design, design fiction, thematic analysis, grounded theory and endogenous topic analysis are employed within three studies reported here. The two formative studies reported seek to elicit user and service provider viewpoints on the challenges of using personal data in media experiences. This is followed by the co-design of a media experience that leverages personal data while including a ‘data dialogue’ that aims to respond to challenges previously uncovered. This design is presented to users and service providers to evaluate their response on this ‘data dialogue’ and to further probe the challenges of using personal data within the media experience. The contribution of this work could be categorised into two, conceptual contributions and implication for design. The conceptual contributions explicate the following challenges, as reasoned by both users and service providers. They present the practically grounded subtleties embodied by these challenges when considered within the context of media experiences leveraging user personal data. This is done by comparing the findings of the studies reported here to build upon and contribute to previous conceptualisations of these challenges within literature from multiple disciplines. These conceptual contributions are : •Value •Trust •Privacy •Transparency •Control •Accountability The implications for design build upon these conceptual contributions to present some practically reasoned sensitivities to be taken into account when considering the design of media experiences that leverage personal data. These recommendations combine the viewpoints of the users and service providers to present design considerations that are sensitive to the challenges raised by both parties, to work towards responding to these challenges. These sensitivities are focused around the following challenges : •Trust •Privacy •Transparency •Control •Accountability The conceptual engagement with challenges here highlight the importance of enabling the users with a more central role in this scenario while the implications for design provide sensitivities that help realise this shift, to work towards alleviating the challenges of both the users and the service provider

Human data interaction through design:An explorative step from theory to practice using design as a vehicle

The increasing use of personal data and AI in everyday technologies has resulted in the amplification of complex and intertwined socio-technical challenges. These, often exemplified by data abuse, breaches, and exploitation, must be alleviated to support sustainable, resilient and human-centred data economies and positive global innovation. Here, we turn towards Human-Data Interaction, an interdisciplinary branch of research, inspired by HCI, that brings together diverse siloed perspectives to present three holistic response principles: data legibility, negotiability and agency. But, the emergent nature of this field calls for refinement of these theoretical tenets to help them translate into practical and tangible responses that are embedded in the technologies we create. We propose this workshop as a foundational step towards this agenda by opening these principles to the CHI community to encourage critique and dialogue about the strengths, weaknesses, value and opportunities of incorporating HDI into the design and evaluation of technology. The outcomes of this workshop, by engaging with HDI through Design, will form the basis for the next stages of research within HDI by contributing to foundational texts within academia and implementing HDI-infused systems within industry

UbiFix: Tackling Repairability Challenges in Smart Devices

IoT products are increasingly becoming the default, with non-IoT versions of common hardware (e.g., TVs and printers) harder to find. Alongside this adoption surge, lack of support, outdated security, and planned obsolescence present concerning sustainability issues, contribute to eWaste growth and widen digital divides globally. This workshop aims to present and discuss legal, social, technical, and design aspects of repair practices, engaging the Ubicomp community in exploring challenges and opportunities for more repairable IoT devices. Focusing on diverse repair scenarios, the workshop seeks to establish a concise, holistic, and inclusive agenda for this research domain's future. Participants will map key research questions to support the movement towards more repairable technology

The Living Room of the Future

Emergent media services are turning towards the use of audience data to deliver more personalised and immersive experiences. We present the Living Room of the Future (LRoTF), an embodied design fiction built to both showcase future adaptive physically immersive media experiences exploiting the Internet of Things (IoT) and to probe the adoption challenges confronting their uptake in everyday life. Our results show that audiences have a predominantly positive response to the LRoTF but nevertheless entertain significant reservations about adopting adaptive physically immersive media experiences that exploit their personal data. We examine ‘user’ reasoning to elaborate a spectrum of adoption challenges that confront the uptake of adaptive physically immersive media experiences in everyday life. These challenges include data legibility, privacy concerns and potential dystopias, concerns over agency and control, the social need for customisation, value trade-off and lack of trust

Experiencing the Future Mundane

Through the design, development and implementation of the Living Room of the Future (LRoTF), we build upon existing work to progress two strands of research. The first explores how media broadcasters may utilise Object-Based Media (OBM) to provide more immersive experiences. Created in conjunction with the BBC R&D the LRofTF utilises OBM to dynamically customise television content according to audiences’ personal, contextual and derived data. OBM works by breaking media into smaller parts or ‘objects’, describing how they relate to each other semantically, and then reassembling them into personalised programmes. In addition to this media-delivery aspect, the LRoTF explores data protection issues that arise from OBM’s use of data by integrating with the privacy-enhancing Databox system. The second research focus develops understandings of Design Fiction. While the ‘World Building’ approach to Design Fiction describes strategies that place emerging technologies in potential futures, this work expands the scope of these prototypes to create a world within which audiences co-produce a ‘lived’ experience of the future as an ‘Experiential Design Fiction’. By combining the audience’s context with the fiction’s diegesis this research demonstrates a method for extrapolating today’s emerging technologies to create an immersive experience of a possible mundane reality of tomorro

Realising the right to data portability for the domestic Internet of Things

There is an increasing role for the IT design community to play in regulation of emerging IT. Article 25 of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) 2016 puts this on a strict legal basis by establishing the need for information privacy by design and default (PbD) for personal data-driven technologies. Against this backdrop, we examine legal, commercial and technical perspectives around the newly created legal right to data portability (RTDP) in GDPR. We are motivated by a pressing need to address regulatory challenges stemming from the Internet of Things (IoT). We need to find channels to support the protection of these new legal rights for users in practice. In Part I we introduce the internet of things and information PbD in more detail. We briefly consider regulatory challenges posed by the IoT and the nature and practical challenges surrounding the regulatory response of information privacy by design. In Part II, we look in depth at the legal nature of the RTDP, determining what it requires from IT designers in practice but also limitations on the right and how it relates to IoT. In Part III we focus on technical approaches that can support the realisation of the right. We consider the state of the art in data management architectures, tools and platforms that can provide portability, increased transparency and user control over the data flows. In Part IV, we bring our perspectives together to reflect on the technical, legal and business barriers and opportunities that will shape the implementation of the RTDP in practice, and how the relationships may shape emerging IoT innovation and business models. We finish with brief conclusions about the future for the RTDP and PbD in the IoT

Understanding the challenges of using personal data in media experiences

This thesis explores the challenges associated with the turn to personal data in novel media experiences. Emergent media experiences, is turning towards using personal data as a resource to help enhance the possibilities for innovation in media service provision. But while the capabilities presented by personal data are manifold here, historically this shift has seen to introduce many socio-technical challenges that confront the use of these experiences. It is the study and understanding of these challenges, as manifest within the scope of media experiences leveraging personal data that this research turns to. The research studies this problem from the perspective of two stakeholders involved in this scenario, the users and the service providers. Here, an overtly multidisciplinary approach is adopted, starting from the literature review which engages with previous work from the disciplines of media research, technology, digital economy, law and ethics. To do this, a range of methods which support qualitative research like informal interviews, focus groups, scenario based design, design fiction, thematic analysis, grounded theory and endogenous topic analysis are employed within three studies reported here. The two formative studies reported seek to elicit user and service provider viewpoints on the challenges of using personal data in media experiences. This is followed by the co-design of a media experience that leverages personal data while including a ‘data dialogue’ that aims to respond to challenges previously uncovered. This design is presented to users and service providers to evaluate their response on this ‘data dialogue’ and to further probe the challenges of using personal data within the media experience. The contribution of this work could be categorised into two, conceptual contributions and implication for design. The conceptual contributions explicate the following challenges, as reasoned by both users and service providers. They present the practically grounded subtleties embodied by these challenges when considered within the context of media experiences leveraging user personal data. This is done by comparing the findings of the studies reported here to build upon and contribute to previous conceptualisations of these challenges within literature from multiple disciplines. These conceptual contributions are : •Value •Trust •Privacy •Transparency •Control •Accountability The implications for design build upon these conceptual contributions to present some practically reasoned sensitivities to be taken into account when considering the design of media experiences that leverage personal data. These recommendations combine the viewpoints of the users and service providers to present design considerations that are sensitive to the challenges raised by both parties, to work towards responding to these challenges. These sensitivities are focused around the following challenges : •Trust •Privacy •Transparency •Control •Accountability The conceptual engagement with challenges here highlight the importance of enabling the users with a more central role in this scenario while the implications for design provide sensitivities that help realise this shift, to work towards alleviating the challenges of both the users and the service provider

Challenges of using personal data to drive personalised electronic programme guides

Media researchers are adopting personalisation in diverse ways to deliver increasingly context-sensitive and customised media experiences. This paper explores user attitudes towards a personalised Electronic Programme Guide which tailors media recommendations based on users’ personal data. We used scenario based exploration enabled by the use of probes to convey the functionalities of data-driven Personalised EPGs and to facilitate user discussions around its potential use. Users preferred personalised EPGs over current popular EPGs but expressed a significant lack of trust in the personal data collection that drives personalisation. Users appreciated the functionalities afforded by personalisation of media but were apprehensive about the implications of the personal data being collected about them, particularly in the context of their homes. This calls for the need to design future personalised media experiences that help enhance trust in these socio-technical settings