ABSTRACT
This concluding chapter draws together the findings presented earlier in this book to argue that the future of self-tracking and personal data will benefit from the building of new relationships between the social sciences, design, industry and users. Self-tracking and personal data are often designed for imagined users who do not personify the ways of being human that has been evidenced by both our own ethnographic research and the corresponding anthropological, sociological and pedagogical theory which has been developed by ourselves and others. The chapter argues that there are many possible beneficial uses of self-tracking technologies for change-making across applied research fields such as health, education and safety, but that these will be better realized if the ways that people experience, engage with and imagine their lives with personal data are attended to.
