Hello, everyone.
Welcome to this video on our paper,
"Speculative Data Work and Dashboards,"
written by myself Michael Hockenhull,
and Marisa Leavitt Cohn from the IT University
of Copenhagen. In this paper, we build on research from CSCW,
HCI and STS on the increasing use of data,
its infrastructures, and visualizations
within organizations to explore data
use in a Danish public sector organization.
We argue that an overlooked aspect of this work
can be called, speculative data work,
with reference to research on speculation,
and data work respectively, and analyze
its nature and the tensions it creates
within your organization.
Furthermore, we draw from speculative design research
to explore the notion of a speculative dashboard
as a design concept to allay or channels such speculative data
work into more cooperative forms and better systems.
The context of the paper, as I said,
a Danish public sector organization
where we set out to follow a project
to innovate the organization using
data and atypical employment profiles.
It was a workplace ethnography which
took place over 18 months.
We did 10 formal interviews and the number of more informal
ones, of course.
We use grounded theory to look at the material
and took an approach of iterative interpretation
through coding and memoing of the interview material
ethnographic jobs and other field notes.
And we developed this into the themes and particularly
certain tables in the paper which provide
the insight into the concept.
And the organizational diagrams placed here,
on the right-hand side of the video,
and particularly our field work took place
in certain local units in the organization,
and in certain central units.
Furthermore, we developed or performed
design exercise where we tested the concept
of speculative dashboards together with IT professionals.
And you can see some examples of those,
like hand paper drawing or computer-based dashboards that
were generated from that exercise.
Speculative data work as a concept
refers to the work of speculating
with on and about data.
And on the right-hand side, you can
see one of the tables we developed to explore
what this concept means.
This concept builds on research on data work and data valences
in particular.
And it came about by analyzing how speculative data work is
involved in defining the validity of data,
the affects it produces, its valences, and other kinds
of data work, as highlighted here on the table.
It was also analyzed in relation to different groups
of the organization, as is shown here in the columns.
And particularly, we identify how
it leads to organizational tensions based
on the kind of central speculation
that each group performs relative to their experience
with working with data.
Speculative dashboards on the other hand,
was a design concept we developed
in working with IT professionals as a kind of speculative design
exercise.
It consisted in hacking the genre of dashboards.
The popular visualization format often
used in business intelligence software.
And to instead create a dashboard
for speculating by juxtaposition in different kinds of data
than you would normally use in an organization
and to provoke a situation in which we
suggested collaborative use of data across an organization.
It's an early prototype, but we imagine
it to be either an exercise that you can do together as a team
to think about or speculate on different kinds of data,
or as an actual infrastructure to develop a prototype.
This is an example of one such speculative data or spectrum
dashboard which shows the juxtaposition on the one hand
qualitative social media feed on the left side of the frame
versus more quantitative representations of data
such as heat maps or network graphs.
In conclusion, the paper sets forth
an empirically grounded concept denoting speculative work
surrounding data and points out how this
causes organizational tensions.
And on the other hand, it develops the notion
of a design concept of a speculative dashboard developed
together by two professionals, which
tries to hack this popular genre and provide an opportunity
to channel speculative data work.
In future work, we want to more better qualify this concept,
develop a speculative dashboard prototype
through participatory design, and test it
in an organizational setting.
Thank you very much for your attention.