Empowerment through my data: my way towards social informatics
“Technology is not the solution. It’s the medium. The real solution lies in empowering people with meaningful insights about themselves.”
Introduction
User experience research (UXR) has become increasingly relevant across industries and institutions. Yet, its implementation is often reduced to prescriptive design: designers and developers receive requirements and transform them into features, often without questioning the larger context or real human needs. This realization was one of the reasons I transitioned from industry into academia to dig deeper into the why and for what purpose behind technology-mediated solutions.
This post traces the evolution of my research journey: from technical design of wearable systems to community-centred technology, from tracking behaviour to empowering decision-making.
From Technology-Driven to User-Driven Design
My interest in UX research began during my doctoral work, where I was tasked with designing wearable sensor kits for patients recovering from hip and knee replacement surgeries. The original objective was clear: design a system that works. I studied sensor placement, data visualization, and usability.
But something was off.
Users didn’t find value in the prototypes. They saw no purpose in the data. It wasn’t enough that it “worked.” What they needed was a system that fit their everyday realities, one that could empower, not just inform. That’s when I shifted from designing devices for users to designing with and through users.
Understanding Before Designing
I stepped away from technical specs and immersed myself in ethnographic work: Who were these users? What were their post-surgery expectations? How did recovery affect their identity and social life?
This process grounded my work in Human-Centred Design (HCD) and brought new collaborators, sociologists, anthropologists, and fellow technologists, into the research. It became clear that improving the user experience required more than good interfaces. It required a deeper understanding of people’s values, emotions, and daily contexts.
Data That Empowers: KARA Framework
One insight became central: data often tells people what to do, walk 10,000 steps, reduce energy use, drink more water. But it rarely asks why or how it fits into their lives.
I wanted to close the loop: not just collect user data, but return it to them in meaningful, personalized ways. This led me to adopt and extend theories from:
- Personal Informatics (Li et al., 2010)
- Experience Sampling Method (Csikszentmihalyi, 1983)
And to develop a framework I call KARA:
- Knowledge – Gaining objective and subjective data
- Awareness – Recognizing patterns and emotional triggers
- Reflection – Making sense of the information
- Action – Taking meaningful, self-directed steps
KARA aims to support users on a path toward autonomy in behaviour change, not compliance.
A Shift in Context: From Global North to Global South
My early work was situated in the Global North, where users typically have internet access, educational literacy, and social safety nets. But when I returned to my home country, I encountered a different reality, one marked by inequality, infrastructural limitations, and vast unmet health needs.
Here, those who would benefit most from personal technologies are often those least able to access or make use of them.
This disconnect made me rethink everything.
Toward Community-Centred Design
I redirected my work toward collective processes in community contexts. I began exploring users not as isolated individuals, but as social actors embedded in networks of relationships, constraints, and shared values.
This shift revealed a flaw in traditional UX approaches. We often optimize individual experiences (and attention) at the expense of collective wellbeing. People are increasingly immersed in interfaces that pull them away from their surroundings, even while walking, eating, or socializing.
What if we shifted from UX for individual delight to UX for social cohesion?
A Call for a New Paradigm
This is the moment to evolve from User-Centred Design (UCD) to Community-Centred Design (CCD). CCD calls for responsible, systems-aware design that considers:
- How products and services shape shared spaces and relationships
- How data can be co-owned, co-interpreted, and co-used
- How empowerment emerges not just from individual insight, but collective meaning-making of people and culture.
CCD enables us to rethink how we live, work, and relate in an age of ubiquitous technology. It challenges us to design not for communities, but with them.
Closing Reflection
My journey from sensor kits to collective empowerment has taught me one thing above all: designing for wellbeing is not just a technical challenge, it’s an ethical and social one.
If you are a researcher, designer, or technologist working with data, I invite you to ask:
Who is being empowered and who is being left out?
References
Rafael A. Calvo and Dorian Peters. 2019. Design for Wellbeing – Tools for Research, Practice and Ethics. In Extended Abstracts of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ’19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Paper C15, 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290607.3298800
Csikszentmihalyi, M., & Larson, R. (1983). The experience sampling method. New Directions for Methodology of Social & Behavioral Science, 15, 41–56.
Li, I., Dey, A. K., & Forlizzi, J. (2010). A stage-based model of personal informatics systems. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 557–566). https://doi.org/10.1145/1753326.1753409
Singh Rathore, N. (2022). Dismantling traditional approaches: community-centered design in local government. Policy Design and Practice, 5(4), 550–564. https://doi.org/10.1080/25741292.2022.2157126