ToTs & TiPs

Visceral Privacy and Intuitive Toxicology Much current scholarship examining online privacy and surveillance suggests either legal and/or narrowly technical solutions to contemporary anxieties around data tracking, aggregation, and analytics. In these discussions, human privacy is not always understood as an embodied, subjective phenomenon. In this talk, I will argue for a new focus on the visceral aspects of privacy as a prompt for both research and design, and explore how online privacy can be supported by what I term “data visceralizations”: representations of information that engage multiple senses including touch, smell, taste, and emotional arousal. Through comparisons with an analogous concept from environmental science, “intuitive toxicology” — interventions for mobilizing visceral responses to warn against contaminated air, water, and food - I argue for making data more visceral in novel privacy-preserving and enhancing technologies. Speaker: Luke Stark is completing his PhD in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University under the supervision of Helen Nissenbaum. His dissertation project, “That Signal Feeling: Psychology and Interaction Design from Smartphones to the Anxious Seat,” explores the genealogy of how psychological theories of emotion have been built into the design of interactive systems. Luke holds both an Honours BA in History & English and an MA in History from the University of Toronto. Luke is a 2015-16 Doctoral Fellow at the NYU Center for the Humanities, and has been generously funded by the National Science Foundation, New York University’s Provost’s Global Research Initiative, the Intel Science and Technology Center for Social Computing, and Microsoft Research. Learn more at http://starkcontrast.co.