Investigating Composite Relation with a Data-Physicalized Thing through the Deployment of the WavData Lamp

This paper reports on a field study of the WavData Lamp: an interactive lamp that can physically visualize people’s music listening data by changing light colors and outstretching its form enclosure. We deployed five WavData Lamps to five participants’ homes for two months to investigate their composite relation with a data-physicalized thing. Findings reveal that their music-listening norms were determined by the instantiated materiality of the Lamp in the early days. With a tilted form enclosure, the WavData Lamp successfully engendered rich actions and meanings of the cohabiting participants and their family members. In the end, the participants described their experiences of entangling with and living with the Lamp as a form of collaboration. Reflecting on these empirical insights explicitly extends the intrinsic meaning of the composite relation and offers rich implications to promote further HCI explorations and practices.