Dashboards for Posthuman Life

Theorist and designer Jaya Klara Brekke is creating fictional data feeds that help users to better understand the impact of their actions on the environment and their own privacy.

Jaya Klara Brekke

Francesca Bria

Typically used for collecting data and intelligence by security agencies, for advertising, in scientific research, or in governance, dashboards present visualizations, insights, oversights, settings, and controls over data. They are a lens into constantly changing datascapes over which there is an ongoing battle to establish sovereignty.

In her project for Forecast, mentored by digital policy expert Francesca Bria, Brekke creates a speculative fiction around a data dashboard for an ordinary person living in posthuman times. What if people could have a say in how a given AI is trained using their data? And a say over how it is used? What if people could have real-time insight into the well-being of companion species? What if such a data dashboard could offer an understanding of how one’s actions and data affect humans and nonhumans elsewhere?

At the Forecast Forum, Brekke showed “user stories,” a software-development method used to describe what a given software needs to achieve. The simulated “users” of these posthuman dashboards, however, were developed from the perspectives of critical theorists working on the politics of data and algorithms. These user stories and initial designs will constitute the first stage in a larger immersive work, which will be shared with the public at the Forecast Festival in April. Ahead of the festival, Brekke and Bria met for a work-stay to edit and finalize the work.

Jaya Klara Brekke is a cryptographic geographer and designer; writer and strategist at privacy company Nym; and member of Magma Collective Think and Do Tank.

Watch a recap of Brekke‘s contribution at the Forecast Festival 6: