Persuasive Anxiety: Designing and Deploying Material and Formal Explorations of Personal Tracking Devices

Abstract

Self-tracking refers to the use of computational sensing devices that track data about user behavior to provide self-knowledge. Self-tracking devices are often designed to function transparently, with minimal user awareness of the tracking process. Although effective from an information-processing perspective, this invisibility can also background issues of materiality and user experience. Further, research on self-tracking has shown that devices are often abandoned, can cause user anxiety, and reflect hegemonic social norms. Self-tracking is an emerging technology and skilled cultural practice, but its central issues—the space of design possibility, the nature of user needs/experiences, and sociopolitical implications—remain unclear. We present Persuasive Anxiety, a project informed by research through design, critical design, and design deployment studies. We report on the design and longitudinal deployment of three designs—Candy Camera, Melody Bot, and Fractured View—to spark critical dialogue about self-tracking. The project helped reveal some the relationships between self-tracking and destructive social norms, as well as how they might be mitigated; the emergence of self-tracking as a performative cultural skill; and the possibility of bringing digital content authoring tools/research into a closer dialogue with self-tracking to give self-trackers greater agency over this cultural practice.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under award 1002772 and the Intel Science and Technology Center for Social Computing.

Notes on contributors

Shad Gross

Shad Gross ([email protected],www.shadgross.com) is a researcher with an interest in materiality and tangible interactions; he is a UX Design Strategy Researcher at Angie’s List.

Jeffrey Bardzell

Jeffrey Bardzell ([email protected],www.soic.indiana.edu/all-people/profile.html?profile_id=159) is a design researcher with an interest in design aesthetics and humanistic human–computer interaction; he is an Associate Professor in the School of Informatics and Computing of Indiana University.

Shaowen Bardzell ([email protected],https://sbardzell.wordpress.com/) is a design researcher with an interest in participatory design and feminism; she is an Associate Professor in the School of Informatics and Computing of Indiana University.

Shaowen Bardzell

Jeffrey Bardzell ([email protected],www.soic.indiana.edu/all-people/profile.html?profile_id=159) is a design researcher with an interest in design aesthetics and humanistic human–computer interaction; he is an Associate Professor in the School of Informatics and Computing of Indiana University.

Shaowen Bardzell ([email protected],https://sbardzell.wordpress.com/) is a design researcher with an interest in participatory design and feminism; she is an Associate Professor in the School of Informatics and Computing of Indiana University.

Michael Stallings

Michael Stallings ([email protected], www.michaelstallings.me) is a designer with an interest in K-12 education technology; he is a User Experience Designer at Blackbaud.