Data City: Leveraging Data Embodiment Towards Building the Sense of Data Ownership

Human-Data Interaction (HDI) is an emerging area of research as personal data are being increasingly collected, analyzed and traded. We conducted a small-scale qualitative research to explore people’s perception, behaviour and attitude towards data via survey, interview and workshop. The results revealed that the vagueness of data ownership is the main concern. To form a better understanding, also help the novice users to have an enhanced awareness on their data privacy, together with the findings, we leverage embodied interaction aiming at enhancing the sense of data ownership through providing augmented physical representations. Following this approach, we propose an Augmented Reality installation ‘DataCity’ as a sample application, that connects the user’s smartphone application data to physical objects. Through physical manipulation and augmented reality control, our design provides evidence on how to clear the boundaries of users’ personal data, building their senses of ownership and eventually develop a better privacy literacy.