Understanding the Challenges around Design Activities that Incorporate Behavioral Data

Recently, methods and approaches such as Participatory Data Analysis, Data-Enabled Design, and Contextual Inquiry have highlighted how design activities can benefit from behavioral data. This data offers new ways to learn from what people do and how they do it, across time and space. However, behavioral data introduces changes and frictions to design activities and poses several challenges for designers to overcome. In this paper, we conduct two workshops with 18 expert designers, from industry and academia, to understand the nature of these challenges, beyond the technical aspects. We contribute by underlining the challenges and opportunities of incorporating behavioral data into design activities; including a design perspective on data, interacting with participants, and interacting with regulatory bodies. We translate our findings into opportunities for a better alignment between regulatory bodies, designers, and participants. We propose to harness the iterative nature of design activities and embedded it into a process that allows for continuous reflection, reassessment, and review of highly dynamic datasets.