Smart Clothing in a Circular Economy : Anticipating Futures of Surveillance and Digital Divide through Data Leakage

Anticipatory practices materialise and reframe uncertain futures. The present work investigates the merging points of future trajectories normally observed in isolation. Our case examines the two future imaginaries of circular economy and smart garments by staging a future through prototyping and scenario development, i.e., critical uncertainties.
The physical prototype we developed, is a reusable smart shirt for tracking personal and environmental data, and self-reflection. Participants experience the prototype in their own environment for two weeks and are confronted with a fictional data leakage.
The scenario development identified two critical uncertainties: surveillance and digital divide. We look at these uncertainties along four exclusive scenarios, including state and cooperate surveillance, as well as social divide along wealth and technology access.
The anticipatory work done in the form of scenario development and an in-the-wild study serves to understand the disparity of participants’ current privacy beliefs and data practices, their imaginaries of sustainable futures, and their concerns for data privacy and eventually identify the implications of the collision of future trajectories beyond a techno-economic perspective, i.e., environmental, social, ethical, and political.
We examine people’s privacy practices and concerns through contamination and contextual integrity. These concepts support us in disclosing the anticipatory assumptions in narratives of a sustainable future. These assumptions are contested through a semi-structured interview, which presents the prototype in the different critical uncertainties scenarios to inspire critical reflection on how past and present experience shapes future imaginaries.