#chi2017

Our Quantified Data and Social Relationships workshop at CHI2017 addressed the question: 

How do we design for shared interactions and experiences with data, which acknowledge the messiness, intricacies, transitions and sensitivities within human relationships?

I thought the workshop was a success. The format worked well. The workshop began with short presentations of the 12 accepted papers followed by panel discussions (as opposed to individual Q+A at the end of each talk). Following that we used ideation cards and ‘speed dating’ to develop some interesting and creative scenarios and accounts of ‘data relationships’.

Accepted papers from the workshop are available here: https://openlab.ncl.ac.uk/datarelationships/accepted-papers/

I co-organised this workshop with Chris Elsden & Abigail Durrant (Newcastle), Aisling O’Kane & Paul Marshall (UCL), Rowanne Fleck (Birmingham), and Deborah Lupton (Canberra). Chris was the mastermind behind the whole thing.

I’m just back from CHI 2017 in Denver. Here are my top picks from the conference (so far - I’ve not read everything). Its been a good year, so the list is longer than usual...

Papers on personal tracking

Naomi Yamashita, Hideaki Kuzuoka, Keiji Hirata, Takashi Kudo, Eiji Aramaki, Kazuki Hattori Changing Moods: How Manual Tracking by Family Caregivers Improve Caring and Family Communication

Tracking of by one family member of another with depression. interestingly/controversially the subject of tracking does not have direct access to the logs. 

Elizabeth V. Eikey, Madhu C. Reddy. It's Definitely Been a Journey: A Qualitative Study on How Women with Eating Disorders Use Weight Loss Apps

Interesting study of the use of My Fitness Pal by women with eating disorders. Many interesting design suggestions. 

Jochen Meyer, Merlin Wasmann, Wilko Heuten, Abdallah El Ali, Susanne CJ Boll. Identification and Classification of Usage Patterns in Long-Term Activity Tracking

A nice study of usage patterns with activity trackers. The paper looks in a fairly simply ways at whether an app was looked at or not. 

Ravi Karkar, Jessica Schroeder, Daniel A Epstein, Laura R Pina, Jeffrey Scofield, James Fogarty, Julie A Kientz, Sean A Munson, Roger Vilardaga, Jasmine Zia. TummyTrials: A Feasibility Study of Using Self-Experimentation to Detect Individualized Food Triggers.

This a great paper that brings principled self experimentation to personal tracking. The authors have created and trialled an app to support self experimentation by people with irritable bowel syndrome. 

Ruth Ravichandran, Sang-Wha Sien, Shwetak N Patel, Julie Kientz, Laura R. Pina. Making Sense of Sleep Sensors: How Sleep Sensing Technologies both Support and Potentially Undermine Sleep Health 

This paper presents a survey and interview study with people that use sleep trackers and several interviews with health professionals. The authors make some very interesting points about measurement. 

Daniel A Epstein, Nicole B Lee, Jennifer H Kang, Elena Agapie, Jessica Schroeder, Laura Pina, James Fogarty, Julie A. Kientz, Sean Munson. Examining Menstrual Tracking to Inform the Design of Personal Informatics Tools

A broad study of menstrual tracking apps that makes some interesting points on gender. 

Amid Ayobi, Paul Marshall, Anna L. Cox, Yunan Chen. Quantifying the Body and Caring for the Mind: Self-Tracking in Multiple Sclerosis

This is an interesting study of self tracking by people with degenerative disorders. The paper considers the mindful and lived aspects of tracking along with the more functional aspects. 

Chia-Fang Chung, Nanna Jensen, Irina A Shklovski, Sean Munson. Finding the Right Fit: Understanding Health Tracking in Workplace Wellness Programs  

A systematic take on tracking in workplace wellness initiatives.

Papers related to mindfulness

Bin Zhu, Anders Hedman, Haibo Li. Designing Digital Mindfulness: Presence-In and Presence-With versus Presence-Through 

This paper presents a helpful framework for designers describing different ‘levels’ of mindfulness technology.

Christina Kelley, Bongshin Lee, Lauren Wilcox. Self-tracking for Mental Wellness: Understanding Expert Perspectives and Student Experiences 

A paper on self tracking for stress management and mental wellness among students, focusing on the challenges of uptake.

Petr Slovák, Christopher Frauenberger, Geraldine Fitzpatrick. Reflective Practicum: a Framework of Sensitising Concepts to Design for Transformative Reflection 

The paper considers two examples of ‘social emotional learning’ (a counselling course, and a primary school life skills programme) through the lens of Schön’s work.

Blockchain and Bitcoin

Larissa Pschetz, Ella Tallyn, Rory Gianni, Chris Speed. Bitbarista: Exploring Perceptions of Data Transactions in the Internet of Things. 

Interesting work with a bitcoin integrated coffee machine showing provenance data. 

Karim Jabbar, Pernille Bjorn. Growing the Blockchain Information Infrastructure

A study of a Bitcoin entrepreneur setting up bitcoin ATMs and payments infrastructure in Denmark. 

Corina Sas, Irni Eliana Khairuddin. Design for Trust: An Exploration of the Challenges and Opportunities of Bitcoin Users

Interesting study of Bitcoin users and issues of trust out there in the wild. 

Papers on messaging

Mariam Hassib, Daniel Buschek, Paweđ W WoƝniak, Florian Alt. HeartChat: Heart Rate Augmented Mobile Chat to Support Empathy and Awareness 

The creation and trial of an app in which biometrics and mobile messaging are combined. 

Katerina L. Gorkovenko, Nick Taylor, Jon Rogers. Social Printers: A Physical Social Network for Political Debates. 

Interesting design study in which social printers were placed in the home. 

Frank R. Bentley, Nediyana Daskalova, Nazanin Andalibi. “If a Person is Emailing You, It Just Doesn't Make Sense”: Exploring Changing Consumer Behaviors in Email

This paper considers what email is to people these days, when messaging apps are so widely used. Email is now primarily for relationships with business, such as collection of receipts and coupons. 

Rui Zhou, Jasmine Hentschel, Neha Kumar. Goodbye Text, Hello Emoji: Mobile Communication on WeChat in China 

A qualitative study looking at sticker and emoji based messaging in China.

Reviews

Joe Marshall, Conor Linehan. Misrepresentation of Health Research in Exertion Games Literature

A lot of health related research is misrepresented when describing the reasons for creating exertion technology.

Ari Schlesinger, W. Keith Edwards, Rebecca E. Grinter. Intersectional HCI: Engaging Identity through Gender, Race, and Class

A meta review of identify representation in the HCI literature.

Method

Chris Elsden, David Chatting, Abigail C. Durrant, Bettina Nissen, Andrew Garbett, John Vines, David S. Kirk. On Speculative Enactments 

Design fiction meets user studies.

Barry Brown, Eric Laurier. The Trouble with Autopilots: Assisted and Autonomous Driving on the Social Road

A methodologically interesting paper using YouTube as a source of data.

Papers on “Datawork”

Melanie Feinberg. A Design Perspective on Data

We should think of data not just in terms of use and representation, but in terms of its creation and design.

Peter Tolmie, Rob N Procter, David William Randall, Mark Rouncefield, Christian Burger, Geraldine Wong Sak Hoi, Arkaitz Zubiaga, Maria Liakata. Supporting the Use of User Generated Content in Journalistic Practice

A study of journalists use of data tools, showing amongst other things that they do not simply take the output of these tools at face value but combine sources of information and treat them sceptically. 

Nadia Boukhelifa, Marc-Emmanuel Perrin, Samuel Huron, James Eagan. How Data Workers Cope with Uncertainty: A Task Characterisation Study

Introduces (to me at least) the idea of “data work” and “data workers”.

Posters

Asma Ghandeharioun, Rosalind Picard. BrightBeat: Effortlessly Influencing Breathing for Cultivating Calmness and Focus 

Work that reminded me of Tina Bin Zhu’s paper on mindfulness (above).

Ziming Wu, Xiaojuan Ma. Money as a Social Currency to Manage Group Dynamics: Red Packet Gifting in Chinese Online Communities 

Interesting on WeChat payments/gifting. 

Grace Eden, Benjamin Nanchen, Randolf Ramseyer, Florian Evéquoz. On the Road with an Autonomous Passenger Shuttle: Integration in Public Spaces

3 basics every HCI researcher needs to know about how bodies work to improve ANY design. CHI2017

OVERVIEW From Ergonomics to Embodied interaction, the body is a fundamental locus of interaction in HCI research and design. 

image showing the 11 systems of the body - to say nothing of the microbiome

In HCI the body and all its awesome complexity, however, is largely treated as a black box where we focus on designing around the constraints of its input and output.

Image shows typical approach to body in Embodied interaction to be considered as a closed system.

If we crack the lid of the box, however, to understand, for instance,

how sleep affects ability to see errors, or

how stress suppresses creativity or affects recall, or

how social interaction with movement enhances insight,

we can immediately begin to explore new kinds of design challenges to help us perform better from general to specific contexts: imagine the typical scenario of finishing the write up of a CHI paper. If we know something of goings on IN the body,

how would we design a tool that identifies sleep and stress patterns to prompt counterintuitive but beneficial increase of social engagement prior to a critical deadline, for instance?

That’s a new kind of question, isn’t it? for potentially new kinds of interactive designs/systems.

The body is highly complex. No kidding. But in this course we explore how, by cracking the lid of the body black box via three accessible heuristics, we can begin to address these new kinds of questions to enable us to innovate better designs for human performance and enhanced quality of life for all.

About the Course

The premise of this course is that by learning more about how our bodies work – or more particularly how the 11 complex systems (shown in sidebars) that make up our bodies from bones to hormones work - we will have the knowledge we need to take the leap forward necessary in the efficacy of our designs to make real and measurable differences in the world for human wellbeing and quality of life.

MOTIVATION: New Opportunities The body has always been part of HCI from ergonomics to eye tracking to embodied interaction. That engagement has been predicated by the types of hardware and software limiting our interactions with computational systems: ergonomics is critical when we must align our bodies to an immobile system; as systems become more mobile/tactile, it makes sense to think of how our bodies mediate our interactions with devices as part of a larger ecosystem, but where the body is still largely a black box, of interest in terms of supporting its I/O.

That interest is changing. As computational systems become smaller and more pervasive and autonomous, and increasingly data driven, and as opportunities to monitor every orifice increase, we can see HCI having more interest in what those systems tend to be used to monitor: us. Frequently this monitoring falls within what is framed as “health” but may also be work place efficiency or other measures of performance. With this focus only growing (considering how the numer of papers submitted to the Health track this year has nearly doubled) it seems an opportune time for us to chart a path to look inside the black box of the body.

Our goal is to explore how understanding more about our inbodied complexity can help inform design of systems to support our embodied complexity. This focus for HCI researchers to become more selfreliant about the body, to enable us to begin to look inside the body ourselves to see how that informs what we do in terms of designing for interactions with the body is a New Thing.

Some people may say that we do not need to gain this expertise: we can continue to collaborate with doctors or physiologists or whomever who have this expertise. Yes we can of course, but HCI is an interdisciplinary field, where computer scientists learn about visual perception and cognition where psychologists learn to code and sociologists how to design. At the very least, with the approach this course offers, participants will be able to ask better questions and have more informed conversations with those domain experts.

Approach and Outcomes

To come to grips with all the awesome complexity from physiology to endocrinology with some microbiota in between takes years of study to gain expert knowledge. We have 160 mins. The focus of this course is to give participants a sufficient introduction to the complexity of the body’s interconnected systems that it is both accessible and of immediate and practical use. To this end, the course will present and practice a set of three concepts through which to start to develop better knowledge of the relationship of our inner processes on our outer practices.

These concepts are:

Inbodied interaction •

The in5 map of inbodied interactions

The binary body: the fundamental inbodied interaction

Model 1: Inbodied interaction will be framed in two related ways in the course: first as body-based process and second as an approach to interaction research and design. Thus process and practice.

In terms of processes, inbodied interaction considers • How knowledge of various systemic interactions inside the body inform interactions by the body interacting as a whole in the world • In other words, we will consider how inbodied interactions inform embodied interactions. Inbodied interaction as practice like embodied interaction refers to a particular design focus. Understanding inbodied processes enables us to ask novel questions about designing technology to better support embodied interactions from social engagement online to navigating city spaces to learning a new language.

For example, we are all told to move more, and CHI has published a bevy of papers exploring mechanisms to motivate, track and nudge movement; success levels reported are not fantastic. From this course, participants may ask: is the lack of effect related to focusing on the site of pain as the source of pain – that is to get people to move more, we must focus on people’s movement first.

in5 and experiment in a box method described as deployed at Ogilvy

Model 2: In5 (inbodied five) From this course we will use the in5 model that pulls together each of the 11 systems of the body within five fundamental processes between inbodied and embodied interactions, that fundamentally affect our wellbeing, ability to perform at any level cognitively or physically, and impact our quality of life. In brief these 5 processes are: eat, cogitate, engage, move, sleep. We will go into why these five relative to the more formal systems of the body in the course. With this simple model, we gain two things:

BENEFIT1: first we can start with any one of the five to improve each of the other five simultaneously. We can find either the easiest path or the weakest link to achieve benefit.

BENEFIT 2: second, with this model, we have a pathway into the more specific 11 systems of the body. We will for example be able to explore the endocrine system connection with sleep and social engagement as effectors on movement, and from here how movement affects other systems not only cardio-vascular and musculo-skeletal but visceral and lymphatic as well. In other words, by understanding how the in5 approach can be a framework to understand inbodied interaction, we build a secure and robust map to guide us into the richer complexity of the underlying physical systems.

BENEFIT 3: broadening opportunities for HCI lead innovation. In this example the inbodied approach to explore performance/wellbeing via the interplay of any of these 5 interactions – interactions we all already perform all the time anyway – opens up new opportunities for design. For instance, how might an intelligent application be able to leverage a focus on rather than a focus on movement to achieve more movement? Because of the interdisciplinarity of HCI, we have the skills within our community, from sensors to machine learning to ethnography, using this inbodied approach to innovate approaches to health practices. We also have the opportunity to understand WHY we might want to design something other than a step counter, too.

Model 3: Binary Body Fundamental to design in HCI research is the efficacy with which we can evaluate our designs. Part of the goal of inbodied interaction as a research and design practice is to support improving human performance. Human performance from an holistic, inbodied to embodied perspective refers to our capacity to engage with the world. If we are hungry not only is that a distraction, we are also nutrient deficient and this may affect our ability to carry out a particular task. If we are under slept, we may not make more errors than when we are well slept, but our ability to recognize them and correct them deteriorates exponentially.

BENEFIT 4: In the course we will learn how to leverage the very fast binary assessment used by the always on system of the body – the nervous system – to determine positive, negative or null effect of an intervention to affect human performance, immediately.

Course Organization

The approach of the course will be a mix of instruction and practicum across each of the two 80 minute sessions. Session One will cover InBodied Interaction and an introduction to the in5 model. Session Two Will go into more detail of in5 in terms of connecting these processes to internal systems. We will also cover the Binary Body evaluation model and practice this assessment. After instruction in each component, we will have small group practice sessions to develop a new interaction approach demonstrating an application of the concepts just learned.

BENEFIT 5: By the end of the two sessions participants will have practical experience with these three approaches, and potentially both a novel interaction to explore with new collaborators.

Course Instructor

The course is developed and delivered by m.c. schraefel. m.c. is a professor of computer science and human performance at the University of Southampton where she runs the WellthLab (mission: make better normal). m.c. is also a certified, practicing strength and conditioning coach, nutritionist and functional neurology practitioner and coach.

m.c.’s research and publications in HCI are related to information systems design and health interaction; on the physiological side her research is around active mechanisms to alleviate workplace pain (pubmed). More information can be found on m.c.’s websites www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~mc, begin2dig.com and youtube.com/begin2dig

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Related

motivating article in IEEE Computer.

another in Interactions

what we can learn from sport for knowledge work (interactions)

and a think piece on design

Related Related

some functional/practical info and research overview about sitting and standing and moving.

ever wonder about going minimal footwear/barefoot (connections to the brain will consider in the course)

and even more about the microbiome - and how to assess your health with it.

Stay in touch on twitter - follow @mcphoo

A word from Our Sponsors!

Inbodied Interaction is part of a series of activities within the GetAMoveOn ESPRC Health+ Network - join us, eh?