Personal Encoding
This project is a guided experience to log, transform, and embed sensitive data in everyday objects. With an instruction manual and a kit of parts, the experience teaches individuals how to discreetly encode their own data to build self-knowledge and data literacy. With the overturning of Roe v. Wade in the United States, abortion became a crime in many states and mHealth period-tracking apps were scrutinized for policies that could violate consumer privacy The Memiro Personal Encoding project returns agency back to menstruating individuals through decentralizing and obscuring sensitive data in everyday objects.
Context
The post-Roe world has instilled fear of incrimination using data from period tracking apps. Personal Encoding provides a path forward for users to understand their bodies and habits with personal engagement supported by the cultivation of data literacy. It impacts today’s world by prioritizing the most vulnerable first and keeping their data encoded and private.
Solution
The product includes a toolkit comprised of an instruction manual in the form of a zine, a set of beads, two sample jewelry pieces with their associated decoding patterns. The zine consists of basic instructions for mapping data points to objects, in this case, beads. It provides people with techniques to build their own data models for any data that they may want to track over any period of time.
Personal Encoding is a personalized and accessible system. An individual can encode any kind of sensitive data discreetly. Depending on an individual's cultural, geographical and political environment one can decide the level of discretion that they embed into the coding structure. The user can represent individual tracking metrics in various bead colors, textures, or sizes depending on the number of parameters being measures. As a beading experience it gives agency to its user to use represent their cultures by wearing beads or encompassing beading patterns belonging to their culture. Time can be encrypted based on user-specified time scales in days, hours, months, or years that does not need to follow a 28-day menstruation frequency.
Download the Zine ~
Download the Zine ~
We designed the zine to be completely open source, click the link below to find the download links to the zine and paper folding guide. The zine is 100% shareable, destructible, modifiable.
Impact
The system could expand to other physical objects, technological capabilities, and decentralized data processing. Activities such as embroidery, stitching, or collection hobbies can encode personal data once the user has a basic understanding of the data format. In an advanced stage, a mobile app experience could enable computer vision to securely read and decode bead patterns or derive new patterns of encryption. With edge computing and blockchain, computing can be distributed and anonymized across secure connections bringing computation and data storage closer to the data source.
Leveraging edge technology and computer vision one could extend a personal artifact to become a powerful tool. The beads could be scanned using computer vision and their meaning can be assigned on scanning, the encoding system can be stored locally via edge computing. In this way, the user’s data remains locally available to them on their device with minimal risk of a data breach or unwarranted sale. The future scope of Personal Encoding does not deny the skepticism around data, data capitalism, and surveillance, but provides an alternative means of harnessing the value of personal information in a secure and trusted context.
