With the proliferation of smart home devices in people's homes, new questions regarding data have emerged: What does Alexa know about me? What is my smart home camera capturing? What does my smart bed data say about me? While smart home device data are commonly used by large corporations, people rarely fully understand what data is being collected, what assumptions can be inferred from the data, and what the implications of those assumptions are.

That's where our project—The Data Epics—comes in. We have enlisted the help of fiction writers who use data from real smart home devices to create a collection of 28 short stories. In this project, we harness the ways people understand complex situations and phenomena (such as home data) through storytelling and narrative structures. We believe that this project is particularly relevant now as more people are spending time at home and investing in smart home technologies.

In essence, we ask: what if data had a story? What relationship would we develop with data and, by extension, with the daily gestures and habits that create it? We commissioned seven fiction writers to write short stories based on people's home IoT devices' data, in Seattle, USA. Each writer was paired with a household and worked with four sets of monthly data from devices such as smart plugs, a smart bed, voice assistants, a smart camera, a garage door opener, a smart exercise bike, and motion sensors. The result is a collection of 28 short stories which cast data in a variety of ways (as a narrator, as a main character, as an underlying force, etc.). By proposing this novel type of data representation, quite different from data visualizations for example, we draw on the power of storytelling to encourage people to build agency and autonomy in considering the privacy and surveillance risks embedded within smart devices and services.

Over the course of the project, the stories took on different forms. They started as bespoke handbound books that were shared from writer to household, offering an intimate and personal experience with data. The full collection of 28 stories are now presented at the dataepics.studio website. Through careful visual and motion design on the website, we let the stories shine through for public engagement. Finally, we held a public live event in Seattle, USA, where authors read one of their stories and offered insight into their creative process during a Q&A panel. This provided an avenue for the writers and households to finally meet, after months of anonymous data and story sharing.

Often, data is seen as neutral and objective. Yet, we find that data, and especially how we read it, is more subjective, born out of a thousand human decisions, goals, constraints and opinions, explicit or otherwise. With Data Epics, we wanted to emphasize the interpretative side of data and highlight the processes of translation that happen whenever we try to make sense of data.

The stories range from funny and surprising, to deeply introspective, to eerie and mysterious. For example, García's "Hi, How Can I Help?" is based on a google voice assistant dataset and tells the story of two roommates whose domestic situation takes an unexpected turn when their voice assistant suggests robbing a bank. Another example is based on a Peloton exercise bike dataset: Saleen's "Assemblage" is the story of a widower whose life (and body) is dramatically transformed by a new Peloton exercise bike. Other stories are told from the data's perspective, such as Madison's "The other fish" in which data muses on its intimate relationship with its owner/producer.

—STARTING OUT: ETHNOGRAPHIC RESEARCH

In this project, we are designing both for people who own smart devices at home, as well as a much broader group of people who may not own any smart devices, but who still encounter data in their daily lives. The idea of the Data Epics emerged after a year-long ethnographic study that aimed at answering: how do people encounter their smart home device data? We conducted a contextual inquiry into the homes of people who own smart devices (from simply one voice assistant, to a whole collection of over 40 sensors and devices). One of the main insights from that research was that people often know that data are being collected, but usually don't get to encounter, let alone actively interpret, their data. In addition, we also found that accessing the data of commercial smart devices is sometimes tricky, requiring multiple layers of interaction, or at times requesting data directly from the company. And, when it is easily accessible, the data is not necessarily easy to read.

—GOAL: RECLAIMING AGENCY WITH DATA

By turning data into fiction, we sought to make it more legible and also to expand the data imaginaries of home smart devices. The sense of neutrality and objectivity of data was dissipated into the stories told about it––instead, the readers get to imagine where data is from, where it goes, and what kind of life it may have. Our goal was to empower people to reclaim agency over their own relationships with data, in a way that allows them to consider surveillance and privacy risks, and to be aware of how they participate in the data economy.

—ACCESSING DATA

With regards to our design process, we used a variety of strategies to collect each dataset. In some cases, the data collection was straightforward, such as downloading files from the smart device company's online platform. In others, the process was more complicated, such as asking the participant to initiate a data request to the company, which took many weeks. In other cases, we had to develop hardware and software solutions to collect data from devices. When we received the data from the households, it often contained additional metadata we didn't need. In order to make the data easy to 'read' for writers, we cleaned the data and created simple visualizations.

—MATERIALIZING DATA: MATERIALIZING STORIES

We worked with the stories created by the seven fiction writers. We created a simple visual layout to typeset the stories, selected evocative fonts for the covers, and handbound the books. Our goal was to give a material form to the stories—for them to become a new embodiment for the data the households originally shared with us. After reading the stories on their own, households were invited to a live reading in Seattle, WA with the authors. This in-person event allowed for the people who gave their data and those who interpreted the data to come together and connect over this experience.

—HOW DID THE HOUSEHOLDS REACT TO THE DATA EPICS?

Our process involved interviewing the people who shared with us their smart home device data after they had read their stories. Each household received four stories, over the course of a year, from the same author. Through our thematic analysis of the interviews, we learned that while smart device users were expecting the stories to act as a mirror of their own lives, they instead found that the stories offered more distorted and ambiguous views of their homes and lives. To be clear, some stories offered truly eerie and uncanny connections to their real lives, but some other stories presented data as its own entity, living a life far away from where it first originated (the home). This surprising, and at times unsettling, representation of data started to open up new questions for home dwellers: Where does my data go? Who will it encounter? What will it say about me? How is my data used by the corporations that will see it? What life might my data have beyond my own private home? These questions point towards new realizations that data are indeed part of a larger capitalist socio-technical system that reaches far beyond the home.

—SHARING THE STORIES: A WEBSITE

To create the Data Epics website, we developed a visual and interaction design language that embraced the ambiguous, open, and fluid definition of data that is central to the project, but that also offered clear connections to the devices producing the data. The core of the project are the stories themselves, so our team created a comfortable two column structure for the story pages. The story (on the right side) is accompanied with the anonymized datasets (on the left side) that were used to imagine the stories. This juxtaposition allows readers to explore the links between data and stories. Each story page also includes a quote from the writer of the story, offering a view into their creative process fictionalizing data. We held a number of design critique sessions with people who were unfamiliar with the project to refine our textual and visual language to ensure our idea of transforming data into stories could be understood by a wide audience.

—TO CONCLUDE: DEFAMILIARIZING AS A TACTIC

In summary, the Data Epics destabilize widespread conceptions of data and, through expressive voices, start to build new imaginaries for data. We strongly believe that by defamiliarizing data—by making it 'strange' through stories—we have a chance at picking people's curiosity and opening up their imaginations around what it's like to be around data. We see this as an important first step towards reclaiming agency and control around personal data. Speculative Design has the power to offer alternative perspectives on things we encounter everyday.