  While self-tracking data is typically captured real-time in a lived
experience, the data is often stored in a manner detached from the context
where it belongs. Research has shown that there is a potential to enhance
people's lived experiences with data-objects (artifacts representing
contextually relevant data), for individual and collective reflections through
a physical portrayal of data. This paper expands that research by studying how
to design contextually relevant data-objects based on people's needs. We
conducted a participatory research project with five households using object
theater as a core method to encourage participants to speculate upon
combinations of meaningful objects and personal data archives. In this paper,
we detail three aspects that seem relevant for designing data-objects: social
sharing, contextual ambiguity and interaction with the body. We show how an
experience-centric view on data-objects can contribute with the contextual,
social and bodily interplay between people, data and objects.
