Our half-day, three-hour workshop employs the methods developed over the last year by our team at the Universities of Liverpool and Exeter, working on attitudes to data across varying areas of the UK workforce and research landscape. As a team, our shared interests lie in the sociotechnical - the everyday but complex interactions between people, technical systems and devices. By playing ‘seriously’ (de Saille et al, 2022) with LEGO to create models of complex sociotechnical phenomena, participants are encouraged to creatively visualise their relationships with data. This workshop may appeal to those interested in creative methodologies, interdisciplinary research, data ethics, and sociotechnical interaction. This workshop is designed to demonstrate, through active participation and engagement, rich qualitative research data which compares favourably with other qualitative approaches.
This approach builds upon the work of Coles-Kemp, Jensen, & Heath (2020) who held workshops for participants to outline their perceived cyber (in)securities. Other studies have focused on risk visualisation (Hall, Heath, & Coles-Kemp, 2015) and everyday data security. Asprion et al. (2020) similarly utilised LEGO Serious Play as an educational tool for visualisation, De Saille et al. (2022) used LEGO as a participatory method for health and social care, and Rashid et al (2020) used LEGO as a tool for wargaming cyberattacks. LEGO has been used across numerous disciplines due to its flexibility and utility as a method to engage with diverse groups.
In this workshop, we will introduce the research of our team, which has focused on attitudes to data in the workplace to inform future policy direction in the UK government with our partners and funders DSTL. Additionally, colleagues have sought to illuminate enablers for better access to smart data services for researchers in their advisory role for the Smart Data Research UK (Formerly Digital Footprints) programme, using creative workshops as a tool to engage simultaneously with experts and laypersons alike. Our research emphasises the importance of sociotechnical factors in decision-making and highlights important attitudes to the use of data, the accessibility of data, data awareness levels, and perceived security threats.
Participants in our workshop are given an introductory skills-based task, then encouraged to build a larger model visualising sociotechnical challenges based on set research questions in groups of 4+. This task is complex and multifaceted, requiring collaborative work and discussion among groups. Upon the completion of this task, volunteers are sought from each group to narrate their model, exploring the meaning behind key components.
Time is allowed for brainstorming and participants will be asked to reflect on a series of prompts to assist with their task. The participants are provided with a colour-coding guide, to help visualise their attitude towards different types of data. The exercise should also demonstrate how these attitudes can vary based on the context of a particular data flow and whether that data is for personal or professional consumption. Participants are encouraged to map their data use in their personal and professional lives while using a colour-coded guide and annotation to answer a series of research questions. This frames the exercise, and each group receives a different task, allowing for additional variety and experience sharing.
The goal is for each group to produce personal/professional visualisations highlighting attitudes to data. Groups are asked to share and discuss their models, which serves as a reflective process while also providing rich, ethnographic data. The workshop length is three hours, and all necessary equipment is provided. The goal of the workshop is to explore data use among research participants as well as to share our reflections on the development of LEGO workshops and associated best practices.
Our workshop has a wider conceptual value. We aim to offer key contributions to debates around the flow and interactions between personal and professional data; the use of data in the workplace; concerns of surveillance; everyday security dilemmas, accessibility and availability of data for innovation and beyond. Furthermore, we aim to demonstrate the value of creative methodologies in exploring complex phenomena and to provide an innovative experience for all participants.
References
Asprion et al, 2020. Exploring Cyber Security Awareness Through LEGO Serious Play Part I: The Learning Experience. Management, 20, p. 22
Coles-Kemp, L., Jensen, R.B. and Heath, C.P., 2020, April. Too much information: questioning security in a post-digital society. In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-14).
de Saille, S., Greenwood, A., Law, J., Ball, M., Levine, M., Vallejos, E.P., Ritchie, C. and Cameron, D., 2022. Using LEGO® SERIOUS® Play with stakeholders for RRI. Journal of Responsible Technology, 12, p.100055.
Hall, Heath & Coles-Kemp, 2015. Critical Visualisation and rethinking how we visualise risk and security, Journal of Cyber Security, 1 (1), pp 93-108
Rashid et al, 2020. Everything is Awesome! Or is it? Cyber Security Risks in Critical Infrastructure, In Critical Information Infrastructure Security: 14th International Conference, CRITIS 2019.
