08-16, 13:00–15:00 (US/Eastern), Workshop A / Tobin 219
Ever wondered what your message history reveals about your communication patterns? This workshop teaches you to extract and visualize your own Signal message history using open-source tools, keeping your data entirely on your local machine while exploring patterns like messaging frequency, vocabulary usage, and communication habits. You’ll also practice democratic design to explore techniques for message history analysis, wearable self-data collection concepts, and definitions of SD-core. With various chains, clips, and jewelry-making supplies available, the presenters will help you store your visualized message history self-data on a micro-SD card that you can craft into a piece of jewelry! Bring your own micro-SD or purchase one from the workshop at cost. You can subvert the extractive data economy and flaunt your independence from the Data Giants one fashionable piece at a time.
Jaguar Kristeller (he/him) is an Alaskan-grown, MIT ’16 mechanical engineer and passionate educator committed to working in climate mitigation, public education reform, personal data empowerment, and digital governance systems. Having spent 5 years in China post-graduation, he speaks fluent self-taught Chinese, and now lives in Boston, working between the US and China in IoT manufacturing. Some of his notable achievements include: helping start a high school, Moonshot Academy, in Beijing, co-developing a decentralized accreditation system (starDAS), and volunteering to develop a fleet of autonomous fixed-wing emergency medical delivery drones in rural Mexico. To learn more, please visit www.kriste11er.com/vision.html
Dana Gretton is a multidisciplinary maker interested in applied linear algebra, security hardware, autonomous planes, UV air sterilization, and VR interface design (notably the Bird 3D cursor). Outside of tech, he enjoys riding electric unicycles, writing Chinese characters, making glass beads, and singing. His current projects focus on rethinking education with new tools like *DAS (decentralized accreditation), engineering mentorship, and cooperative living.
