Envisioning a human-centric data economy through speculative practice and co-design

Through participating in our contemporary digitally-mediated society individuals are surveilled, generating data about them that is analyzed and aggregated to create computational models of their everyday habits, behaviors, desires, and anxieties. The concept of data intermediaries has recently been proposed and gained purchase as digital services that could enable people to have more control over what data is collected about them and how it is used. Yet, data intermediaries currently exist as a high-level aspirational concept. Little is known about how they could or should be designed; and, my doctoral research is oriented towards making contributions precisely at this gap. Stage 1 of my PhD research proposes a diverse range of concepts and scenarios that, taken together, offer a range of possibilities and consequences that personal data, shaped by data intermediaries, might hold for mediating data exchanges in people's everyday lives. Stage 2 mobilizes lessons learned from Stage 1 to create and conduct participatory workshops with teenagers focused on envisioning how their individual and collective desires could better be supported within the data economy. Stage 3 focuses on the creation and deployment of design artifacts that give form to and speculate on potential tensions, anxieties, benefits, and desires revealed through participatory workshops with teenagers in stage 2.