Data Anchorings
Reimagining engagements with environmental data in everyday life
Time: Wed 2025-12-17 09.00
Location: F3 (Flodis), Lindstedtsvägen 26 & 28, Stockholm
Video link: https://kth-se.zoom.us/j/64028786886
Language: English
Subject area: Human-computer Interaction
Doctoral student: Arjun Rajendran Menon , Medieteknik och interaktionsdesign, MID, SFLab
Opponent: Associate Professor Roy Bendor, Department of Human-Centered Design, Delft University, Delft, The Netherlands
Supervisor: Associate professor Cecilia Katzeff, Strategiska hållbarhetsstudier; Associate Professor Björn Hedin, Lärande i Stem; Associate Professor Robert Comber, Medieteknik och interaktionsdesign, MID; Senior lecturer Jorge Luis Zapico, Department of Computer Science and Media Technology, Linnaeus University
QC 20251124
Abstract
Environmental data serves as one of the principal mechanisms for making sense of and organizing sustainable futures in the face of rampant climate change. In the context of everyday life, such data involves notions such as carbon footprints and energy usage metrics. These metrics operate across various scales - from the macro level of United Nations and the Sustainable Development Goals to the micro level of eco-feedback systems for individuals. The underlying assumption is that presenting more data will prompt action. However, this approach has proven inadequate for achieving the scale of change required to address climate crisis and overconsumption. The limitation stems partly from how we relate to and make meaning with environmental data. The presumed objective nature of data invites particular relations to, and sensemaking processes with the data that often fail to connect abstract metrics with lived experience.
Sustainable Human-Computer Interaction (SHCI), a subfield of HCI, initially approached everyday sustainability through technological solutions and persuasive technologies following these assumptions. Scholars have increasingly criticized these limited framings - recognizing that environmental data can create objective but meaningless representations of environmental phenomena and advocate for more relational approaches that embrace individual subjectivity and agency. Given data’s pervasiveness in sustainability discourse, this thesis argues for re-examining our predominantly cerebral relations with abstract environmental metrics. Instead, an alternative possible path could be fostering new relational, embodied connections and sense-making processes that build shared understandings about everyday consumption and encourage participation in change-making.
Building on the four central pillars of environmental data, everyday life, design, and sense-making, I conceptualise Data Anchoring - a design concept for reimagining and recontextualising environmental data in the everyday. Through design exemplars, I articulate how Data Anchoring operates through specific mechanisms - embodiment, social, affect, quotidian, and frame-based strategies that enable new forms of knowing and relating to data. I position its contribution within the broader landscape of SHCI, as a means to transform abstract environmental metrics into meaningful, experiential encounters.