Data Badges: Making an Academic Profile Through a DIY Wearable Physicalization

In this pictorial, we present the design and making process of Data Badges as they were deployed during a one-week academic seminar. Data Badges are customizable physical conference badges that invite participants to make their own independent and personalized expressions of their academic profile by choosing and assembling a collection of predefined physical tokens on a flat wearable canvas. As our modular and intuitive design approach allows the construction to occur as a shared, collective activity, Data Badges take advantage of the creative, affective, and social values that underlie physicalization and its construction to engage participants in reflecting on personal data. Among other unexpected phenomena, we noticed how the freedom of assembly and interpretation encouraged a variety of appropriations, which expanded its intended representational space from fully representative to more resistive and provocative forms of data expression.