ABOUT

What is Reclaim your data about?

The data we generate through our daily actions is highly valuable. While increasingly using digital services, such as paying with creditcard, calling by mobile phones or using loyalty card in the supermarket, a great quantity of digital information is generated. These digital footprints - mapping our individual and collective behaviour - are currently used by companies and organizations and are extremely valuable as a basis for decision making. Commerce recognises this information as trading goods of paramount importance, but the information do also have a significant value for the individual and society. However, when presented to its originators, it is often delivered though paper receipts or in low detail of information. In days when a conscious consumption is the key to a more sustainable life-style, this information has the potential to make us see and change our behaviour and to help us to achieve our goals in terms of increased personal health, economy and environmental awareness. Together with existing services, digital knowledge domains and other digital resources, visualization may form a powerful foundation for a new generation of digital services that helps us reflect upon understand and ultimately take control of and change our behavior. For information about sustainability and ecological impact to have an actual influence on people’s habits, it must be made present in a way that does not add a feeling of stress and information overload, but rather supports and empowers an already ongoing reflection about one’s lifestyle and its consequences in the situation at hand. Environmental awareness is not something one should have to keep in mind, but something one should be supported in achieving.

In our work with building demonstrators that visualize digital footprints, shopping has been chosen as an example domain. The act of shopping is interesting because it involves a series of issues typical to everyday activities. Including a wide span of activities ranging from doing only what is necessary to going shopping as a way of socialising or enjoying oneself, shopping exposes issues such as the need to negotiate many different and often conflicting sources of information ranging from “hard facts” such as price, quantity, availability, budget, etc. to “soft” and experiential qualities such as personal preferences and taste, issues of identity and lifestyle, etc. There are also additional kinds of data, that together with user behaviour data and Internet-based information form an even more powerful base for decisions; i.e. product information from supply management systems, transactional data, life-cycle analysis data or information from knowledge databases covering health and environmental information. Further, credit and membership cards continuously generates digital footprints and data about consumer behaviour, e.g. to be used as basis for target advertisement, forecasting and product planning. Providing this information for consumers with the aid of visualization, this information could prove to be very valuable also as a basis for feedback to consumers, e.g. for making it possible for people to better understand the effects of their consumption over time.

Reclaim Your Data started in November 2007 as a master thesis of Jenny Cahier and Eric Gullberg, which resulted in a business concept called the Open Supermarket. With three prototypes developed from the thesis, the project is now going further in exploring how visual analytics of personal and hidden data may be aquired, analysed and visualized.

RECLAIM YOUR DATA is a project conducted at the Interactive Institute’s C-Studio in Norrköping. Interactive Institute is an experimental IT Institute that combines art, design and technology to create new innovations.