The digitalisation of our societies has made data ubiquitous, capturing the behaviors of individuals through their interactions with products, services, and systems. As design and HCI researchers increasingly integrate data throughout human-centered and participatory design processes, the highly dynamic nature of behavioral data reveals its deep interconnection with people, their behaviors, and experiences. Data-Centric Design leverages data as material for subjective inquiry–an entry point to better understand human dynamics through deeper reflection in research and design processes. This Research Topic aims to collect emerging, illustrative projects from the community, share the messiness of research and design processes with data, and surface good practices for effective and responsible data use. This need emerged from the guest editors' engagement in a series of Special Interest Group (SIG) meet-ups (Gomez Ortega et al., 2023) and workshops (Lee-Smith et al., 2023) at the ACM conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI). [...]

Behavioral data is ubiquitous in products, services, and systems that people interact with. It is increasingly used by design and HCI researchers and practitioners throughout their human-centered and participatory design processes. The highly dynamic nature of behavioral data makes it deeply intertwined with people, their behavior, and their experiences. Thus, it presents unique opportunities and challenges. This Special Interest Group will provide a space to reflect and discuss effective and responsible ways to engage with behavioral data in human-centered design processes. We will explore questions about the types and scale of data used, the contexts in which data is embedded and applied, the methods we rely on, and the forms of engagement of the multiple stakeholders. In doing so, our goal is to collaboratively develop a research agenda, setting the scope for an annual, international symposium on Data-Centric Design.