Merja Ryöppy

While self-tracking data is typically captured real-time in a lived experience, the data is often stored in a manner detached from the context where it belongs. Research has shown that there is a potential to enhance people's lived experiences with data-objects (artifacts representing contextually relevant data), for individual and collective reflections through a physical portrayal of data. This paper expands that research by studying how to design contextually relevant data-objects based on people's needs. We conducted a participatory research project with five households using object theater as a core method to encourage participants to speculate upon combinations of meaningful objects and personal data archives. In this paper, we detail three aspects that seem relevant for designing data-objects: social sharing, contextual ambiguity and interaction with the body. We show how an experience-centric view on data-objects can contribute with the contextual, social and bodily interplay between people, data and objects.

This chapter describes how improvised participatory theatre can be used to encourage change in professional healthcare practice. It focuses on chronic pain, with a brief example from another healthcare project. The principal interest is to demonstrate how theatre processes, for the most carried out as participatory workshops, can be used to explore and influence healthcare practice. The chapter shows how health and illness narratives can be considered temporal, improvised, and performative phenomena that are narrated to life through actual practice. The idea is that narratives of practice emerge from the dynamic, moment-to-moment, and reflexive engagement with actual practice rather than as idealized or generalized accounts about practice. The emphasis is therefore on engendering narratives of practice as a narrating-between-people in a situation as opposed to considering narratives as after-the-fact accounts.

Theatre provides powerful ways to engage people in the development of visions for future interactions, yet theatre is seldom used beyond scenario acting in interaction design. In this workshop the participants are exposed to a novel understanding of theatre, called Postdramatic Theatre, which has emerged as an Avant-garde movement in theatre community to break free of traditional characteristics of theatre, especially the dramatic text, mimesis and the exclusion of the 'real' in a play. Inspired by Postdramatic Theatre we introduce three novel formats of engagement for smart city design: Multi-stakeholder Theatre, Field Study Theatre and Future Product Theatre. The use of these formats will be explored in the context of particular foci that will be developed in collaboration with the workshop participants. As the result the participants are expected to become sensitive to the differences of Dramatic and Postdramatic Theatre and have better readiness to conceive of the potential of Postdramatic Theatre for their own design practice and research.