Research Theme » Data and Human Experience

How do we capture and represent experience through computational tools? How can experiential media systems - 'systems that integrate computing and digital media with the physical and social experience' - enable new insights and understanding of personal or collective significance?

This strand of research began with my doctoral work on lifelogging and examines a variety of scenarios where rich media and smart devices create opportunities for self-exploration through data (Byrne, 2012). Leveraging insights from this work, and in collaboration with John Saduaskas, we investigated the use of students’ self-authored social media content as an inspirational resource for students in K-12. Deployed with 46 eleventh-grade English students across three experimental conditions, we found statistically significantly higher gains in writing quality and indicators of increased motivational benefits by meaningfully personalizing learning (Sadauskas, Byrne & Atkinson, 2015). Equally, my prior work examines how third-parties may similarly benefit: in gaining understanding of another life (Byrne, Kelliher, & Jones, 2011) or in supporting practices like remote ethnography (Byrne et al. 2008). Working with Dr. Aisling Kelliher, we developed a mixed-method framework for the documentation and public representation of nine design futures workshops (Kelliher & Byrne, 2015. The archive was shared through an online platform as a rich resource to study design futures approaches. Similar methods are employed in Project Amelia (see below)