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A diary provides a useful means to express inner thoughts and record experien ces of past events. In re- readings, it also provides a resource for reflection, al- lowing us to re-experience, brood over or even shed the thoughts and feelings we've associated with events or people. To expand on th e ways in which we crea- tively engage in diary-keepi...
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... Indeed, reflection as a component of design has been of growing interest to scholars in CSCW, social computing, personal informatics, and HCI (e.g., [8,30,35,47,56,66,84,85,101,109,112]), particularly with technological accumulation of personal data and its subsequent opportunities for reflection. Past research has explored reflection as part of design, including auto-generated postcards to support non-judgemental self-reflection of food intake as displayed on one's social media [112], a music player that facilitates memory-oriented music listening by allowing users to delve into their personal listening history with different temporal settings [85], and a blogging website designed deliberately to create a private time for self-reflection in the space between when one's post is written and shared [8]. ...
... By highlighting the varying benefits and harms of returns to digital pasts, we emphasize the need for designers and researchers to account for reflective processes within the personal digital archives found on social media. Weight-related journeys present an opportunity to think of how designing for reflection [35,47,66,101] might support those with sensitive or stigmatized past experiences. ...
Documenting weight-related journeys (e.g., weight loss, weight gain) is prevalent on social media, as is weight stigma, resulting in easily accessible personal archives filled with emotional, and potentially stigmatizing content. Through semi-structured interviews with 17 U.S.-based social media users sharing weight-related journeys, we investigate the motivations for and impacts of returning to previously posted weight-related social media content. We show how these personal archives foster a contested relationship between one's past and current self, where returning to past content facilitates dynamic interpretations of the self. We argue these interpretations' impacts cannot be understood without acknowledging and addressing the socio-technical context in which they exist: one filled with weight stigma, fatphobia, and narrow body ideals. We introduce the novel concepts of Transtemporal Support and Transtemporal Harm to describe the support and harms that one experiences in the present from returning to their past social media content. We posit that designs accounting for transtemporal support 1) can facilitate reflective sense-making for users who create repositories of digital artifacts about sensitive, potentially stigmatizing experiences on social media, and 2) should not perpetuate transtemporal harm.
... These options will often quote the influence of scientific studies, but the available work often concerns specific use cases. They may not scale to a general population, involve technology, or rely on varieties and paradigms that are no longer commonplace (e.g., earlier 'non-smart' mobile phones (Lindström et al., 2006)). These approaches could miss essential details, like tactility, flexibility or personalisation -things which appear to make their analogue counterparts useful and compelling (Ayobi et al., 2018). ...
Although self-reflection is a topic that appears in Human-Computer Interaction, the empirical data on the subject can often be dated, fragmented and focused on particular use cases. Our work sought to capture data that would help us better understand the current use of technologies to support self-reflection in the broader population. We did this through a large-scale online survey with a representative sample of internet users in the United Kingdom (N = 998) and a smaller series of follow-up interviews (N = 20). We found that, regardless of recent stress, those with high scores on a scale that measured self-reflection maintained a wider variety of self-reflective activities in recent months. Men reported more access and use of technology for self-reflective activity than women, but women's self-reflection scores were usually higher. We noted that high self-reflectors appear more spontaneous and experimental, using heuristics to mitigate common barriers or adapt their practice to stressors. These individuals appear to favour analogue objects to facilitate reflective practice, utilising technology in more strategic and selective ways.
... Reflection is a core mechanism to translate experience into learning and support personal growth has been explored in various contexts and domains (e.g., education, health, and work [26,36]). Several technologies have been developed to inform design on reflection for everyday practices and personal informatics, for example, through self-tracking [46], lifelogging [6], and digital diaries [32]. Isaacs et al. [22] developed Echo, an Android application designed for users to record and systematically reflect on their daily activities. ...
Voice Assistants (VAs) present promising opportunities for the development of applications for the work domain. While previous research is primarily focused on aiding groups and individuals to be more productive, studies exploring the use of VAs to train and develop collaboration skills are rather limited. In this paper, we examine whether VAs can be used to help individuals improve their collaboration skills through self-reflection. We developed ReflectPal, a Google Assistant application designed to facilitate reflection sessions regarding collaboration challenges. First, we identified a list of frequently occurring challenges in a specific collaboration work environment. Then we designed ReflectPal to address a subset of those challenges and tested it in a two-week in-situ deployment with 19 participants. We found that participants benefited from the structure that the practice provided, leading to deeper and more meaningful reflections than before. However, the study also highlighted the need to design applications that take motivational aspects into account to encourage frequent engagement in self-reflection for skill development. Reflecting on insights from our study, we discuss future design directions of VAs for facilitating self-reflection in a collaborative work context.
... Beyond the meeting context, researchers have developed a number of interfaces that allow users to view emotional or afective signals captured by self-report, diaries or sensor-based systems. These have been used in several domains, such as self-refection [21,36,41], data exploration and information retrieval [18,59,60], stress management [2,20], and studying interpersonal dynamics [28,29]. Data portraits can help people understand more about themselves and other people [12]. ...
... A related approach is to design systems allowing for human emotional expressivity, for human interpretation and not for system interpretation. This can be in the form of self-refection, as in the case of Afective Diary, which analyses various types of behavioral and environmental data to support personal refection [42]. Or in the form of supporting human-to-human communication as is the case with eMoto [20], InTouch [6] and Feather, Scent and Shaker [66]. ...
... The illustrated designs use various types of input, such as body movement, physiological data or contextual data, to analyze emotional content. The projects emphasize concepts such as freedom of interaction, i.e. allowing for diverse possibilities to express oneself [75] and ambiguity of information presentation [42], considering freedom of expression to communicate with the system. Researchers are therefore inspired by movement analysis techniques, such as Laban movement-analysis. ...
... Much HCI research on affective interfaces has focused on supporting emotional wellbeing [15,49,65], memory awareness [50,66], as well as reflection on emotions [29,47,82]. Such work on affective states, usually conceptualized in terms of arousal or intensity, and valence as positive/negative emotions [62], has explored visual representations of both dimensions of affect through colors, shapes, or patterns such as abstract bubbles [50], spirals [64], or anthropomorphic bodily postures [74]. ...
... Compared to prior work on visual interfaces for emotional expression and regulation, participants using ThermoPixels did not only create simple geometric shapes [15,29,47,50,82], but also used the materials provided in the toolkit to create complex non-geometric shapes and patterns in 2D and 3D. Participants who designed interfaces for expression used warm colors such as red or orange, angular shapes, and dense patterns, whereas, participants motivated by the desire to regulate arousal chose to work with cold colors, round shapes, and less dense patterns. ...
... Affective Diary [38], for instance, invites reflection and interpretation of abstract visualizations of one's emotions throughout the day. We envision that monitoring progress through a combination of automatically collected and user generated content [F4b] that reflects meaningful activities to the survivor's QoL, will have a positive effect on rehabilitation. ...
... ivities and represent a personal and meaningful way to store information about one's achievements. It is also a means to express inner thoughts and re-experience past events [38]. The ...
There are over 80 million stroke survivors globally, making it the main cause of long-term disability worldwide. Not only do the challenges associated with stroke affect the quality of life (QoL) of survivors, but also of their families. To explore these challenges and define design opportunities for technologies to improve the QoL of both stakeholders, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 10 survivors and one of their family members. We uncovered three major inter-linked themes: strategies to cope with technological barriers, the (in)adequacy of assistive technologies, and limitations of the rehabilitation process. Findings highlight multiple design opportunities, including the need for meaningful patient-centered tools and methods to improve rehabilitation effectiveness , emotion-aware computing for family emotional support, and rethinking the nature of assistive technologies to consider the perception of transitory stroke-related disabilities. We thus argue for a new class of dual-purpose technologies that fit survivors' abilities while promoting the regain of function.
... Often such information is displayed through biosensory representations in numerical and graph-based form. However, there are other systems which aim to empower users by employing ambiguous biosensing representations [5,7,11,12,16,24,28] to provoke multiple interpretations of biosensory data. These systems often employ mobile and desktop screens which are not always on sight. ...
1 Increasing HCI work on affective technologies is using different materials to represent biosensory data. We explored several thermochromic, heating, and insulation materials to represents skin conductance data through abstract and ambiguous representations. We report on the development of three prototypes to represent emotional arousal using different colors, patterns, and shapes. By critically reflecting on our experience, we highlight problems in these prototypes and propose design guidelines to inform future research for representing arousal using thermochromic materials. BACKGROUND Over the last decade, we have seen a growing HCI interest in emotional wellbeing and affective health [17] particularly focused on emotional memories [14,15,21,22,23], particularly in old age [18] and end of life care [19], affective representations through smart materials [24], and support for mindfulness [2,20]. With the growing interest in biosensing a growing number of technologies focus on capturing biosensory data such as skin conductance, heart rate variability, breathing rate, movement data, brain activity information [29,30,31,32]. Often such information is displayed through biosensory representations in numerical and graph-based form. However, there are other systems which aim to empower users by employing ambiguous biosensing representations [5,7,11,12,16,24,28] to provoke multiple interpretations of biosensory data. These systems often employ mobile and desktop screens which are not always on sight. However, a growing number of research is trying to use alternative kind of displays using thermochromic materials to represent biosensory information [3,7,24]. Such displays are often integrated into wearables and clothing. A growing interest in materials research within HCI and interaction design has helped us understand how the qualities of materials unfold when designing and using interactive systems [8,10,27]. They highlight the importance of understanding the aesthetic and experiential qualities of materials. According to Giaccardi and Karana, different individuals experience materials in different ways as: "properties of a material, the artifact in which a material is embodied, one's previous experience and expectations, and social and cultural values inevitably affect how we experience" [6]. The framework proposes that materials are experienced at four different levels i.e. sensorial, interpretive, affective and performative level. We engaged in a material exploration of thermochromic, heating and insulation materials to design and develop such ambiguous representations that can be used in daily life settings. Through our exploration, we analyzed the interplay of these materials, their properties, constraints, and inner working and developed prototypes to represent changes in skin conductance, also a measure of physiological arousal [24]. In previous work we have shown similar such prototypes [24], however among those we have developed, some have been less successful. Such work however is seldom presented in academic writing [4]. Thus, in this paper, we present three discarded prototypes and critically reflect on our approach to highlights problems and unpack the qualities of thermochromic displays representing skin conductance.
... In the field of HCI, many researchers explored utilizing interactive technologies to improve people's self-awareness. For example, Lindström et al. designed an affective diary that gathers the user's sensor data to form a colorful body shape for improving one's self-awareness [14]. Prior work found that biofeedback systems are good at improving one's self-awareness as such systems can provide realtime body data of the users [12]. ...
The advancement of sensor technology has provided new opportunities for bodily play and consequently enriched our bodily experiences. The emergence of ingestible sensors supports capturing the user's body data continuously. The intimacy between ingestible sensors and human body also shapes our bodily experiences. My research focuses on utilizing ingestible sensors to facilitate playful and engaging experiences in HCI using a Research through Design approach. This will lead to the development of ingestible interfaces, which allow the creation of novel and playful experiences. My work so far has explored the playful experiences that can be designed without crafting the relationships between the user's body and ingestible sensors. This research will contribute to the understanding of how to design playful experiences around ingestible sensors and ultimately inspire designers to create a wider range of future play experiences.
... Indeed, one main means of facilitating reflection in behavior change and personal informatics relies on visualizations of selftracking data, such as Fish'n'Steps [57], UbiFitGarden [22] for physical activity; Affect Aura [60] for affective states and LifelogExplorer [47] for stress. The other approach relies on journaling [65], such as SleepTight [17] for sleep and Affective Diary [58] for manual journaling of emotions. Both of these approaches assume that reflection will occur naturally when data is presented. ...
Mobile, wearable and other connected devices allow people to collect and explore large amounts of data about their own activities, behavior, and well-being. Yet, learning from-, and acting upon such data remain a challenge. The process of reflection has been identified as a key component of such learning. However, most tools do not explicitly design for reflection, carrying an implicit assumption that providing access to self-tracking data is sufficient. In this paper, we present Reflection Companion, a mobile conversational system that supports engaging reflection on personal sensed data, specifically physical activity data collected with fitness trackers. Reflection Companion delivers daily adaptive mini-dialogues and graphs to users' mobile phones to promote reflection. To generate our system's mini dialogues, we conducted a set of workshops with fitness trackers users, producing a diverse corpus of 275 reflection questions synthesized into a set of 25 reflection mini dialogues. In a 2-week field deployment with 33 active Fitbit users, we examined our system's ability to engage users in reflection through dialog. Results suggest that the mini-dialogues were successful in triggering reflection and that this reflection led to increased motivation, empowerment, and adoption of new behaviors. As a strong indicator of our system's value, 16 of the 33 participants elected to continue using the system for two additional weeks without compensation. We present our findings and describe implications for the design of technology-supported dialog systems for reflection on data.
