BC FIPA, in partnership with the Vancouver Design Nerds, held a two-day design jam in Ottawa March 5th and 6th. The purpose of this event was to explore issues around meaningful consent in the context of everyday life ranging from personal wearable technologies to smart homes and smart cities and their relationship to big data. With these different scales in mind, we sought to create new models of generating meaningful consent to mitigate the negative impact these technologies have on privacy. The two-day event brought together a diverse group of experts from academia and industry to advocates and activists working in this space to find creative solutions through a collaborative and inter-disciplinary approach.
Data Privacy Design Jam report title page
The final ‘prototypes’ that emerged after the second day varied in terms of how they approached meaningful consent, but an underlying theme that intersected all four groups was a focus on empowering individuals to take control over their personal information through various methods .
It is important to note that this project in itself is not the final stage in our work on meaningful consent and connected societies. Rather, this project has become a ‘jumping-off point’ that will launch future research and events to further address these issues. More specifically, we have begun to explore the feasibility of hosting another design jam with everyday consumers from various backgrounds rather than expert participants. The process we used could be adapted for either a representative sample of the general public or a predefined select target audience. By providing a similar initial problem and thought processes, the results would provide useful insights to how the public views issues of consent in a modern context.
BC FIPA would like to thank the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada for the opportunity to explore this important issue through the Contributions Program.
