Positions in technology design : A case study of a stress management system

Health data requires context to be understood. I show how, by examining two areas: self-surveillance, with a focus on representation of bodily data, and mass-surveillance, with a focus on representing populations. I critically explore how Information and Communication Technology (ICT) can be made to represent individuals and populations, and identify implications of such representations. My contributions are: (i) the design of a self-tracking stress management system, (ii) the design of a mass-surveillance system based on mobile phone data, (iii) an empirical study exploring how users of a fitness tracker make sense of their generated data, (iv) an analysis of the discourse of designers of a syndrome surveillance system, (v) a critical analysis of the design process of a mass-surveillance system, and (vi) an analysis of the historicity of the concepts and decisions taken during the design of a stress management system. I show that producing health data, and subsequently the technological characteristics of algorithms that produce them depend on factors present in the ICT design process. These factors determine how data is made to represent individuals and populations in ways that may selectively make invisible parts of the population, determinants of health, or individual conception of self and wellbeing. In addition, I show that the work of producing data does not stop with the work of the engineers who produce ICT-based systems: maintenance is constantly required.