Towards Designedly Data Donation in Practice

Abstract:

Behavioural data that shows how and what people do could help designers unlock new ideas and perspectives about their users. However, collecting this data is expensive and time-consuming, and ethical concerns inevitably arise because the data often contains personal information. Ortega presents designerly data donation as an efficient and ethical approach that encourages the active participation of users to obtain contextualised data (Ortega et al., 2021). This subtle switch of attitude towards data collection will help designers reduce concerns about budget or invasion of privacy. Designers can build up proper triggers to inspire users to donate their data and provide enough information to enable donors to autonomously participate in their control and choice. While its potential has been defined, there are a few challenges to further integrating this concept in practice. In particular, designers must understand the whole system to plan the right strategies to call for donors, taking the right action at the right time. With this in mind, the main focus of this project was how to deliver the concept of designerly data donation as a design method for designers in practice. A design challenge and related activities were conducted with UX designers of The Valley and the data-centric design lab at TU delft, after which I proposed the initial shape of the DDD toolkit that can be used in practice as a result of this project.

The full thesis is available here.