Desi Seminar
Abstract
Over recent years, a variety of self-tracking technologies, in the form of wearable devices and mobile apps, have been developed both for research and commercial purposes, in order to e.g., promote healthier lifestyles or raise people’s awareness about their own behavior. As a consequence, the practice of tracking personal data has spread outside the avant-garde circle of “quantified selfers”, reaching a broader user population. Quantified Self rhetoric, nonetheless, which assumes that “self-knowledge” can be gained by rationally analyzing quantitative information, still drives the design and research on self-tracking. This assumption, nonetheless, addresses the needs of just a minority of a constantly growing user base of tracking technologies.
In this talk I will provide an overview of the key issues in current self-tracking research by exploring how specific categories of users, like inexperienced individuals and athletes, track their own data. Then, I will identify both theoretical and design opportunities for going beyond the idea of gaining “knowledge through numbers”, rather focusing on the subjective construction of situated meanings. In so doing, I will point out several insights for changing people’s “habits”, suggesting that we support sense-making rather than pursuing the direct modification of specific behaviors.
Bio
Amon Rapp is a research fellow at University of Torino, where he is a member of the Smart Interactive Objects and Systems group and leads the Smart Personal Technology Lab @ ICxT (Center for Innovation for Society and Territory). His main research interests are related to the exploration of theoretical and design opportunities for creating behavior change technologies and self-tracking tools, as well as of novel techniques to design gamified applications.