Today I’m presenting the paper Removal as a Method A Fourth Wave HCI Approach to Understanding
the Experience of Self-Tracking by myself, Sarah Homewood and my co-authors Anna Vallgårda
from the IT University of Copenhagen and Amanda Karlsson from Aarhus University.
As the field of self-tracking matures, research perspectives have shifted.
Once we move on from viewing self-tracking through the lens of optimization, we can address
how self-tracking shapes lived experience.
This shift in perspective within research on self-tracking reflected the third wave
of human-computer interaction (HCI).
This wave prioritized phenomenological enquiries into the emotional and social effects of using
technologies, rather than enquiries into functionality and usability.
But with our paper, we actually support Frauenberger’s proposal that HCI is entering into a fourth
wave of ‘entanglement HCI’.
We not only support Frauenberger’s proposal, but also develop it by proposing the initial
steps in the development of a method suitable for a fourth wave of HCI.
According to Frauenberger, ‘entanglement theories’ such as post-humanism, feminism,
and post-phenomenology should be adopted and applied to the subject of science and technological
innovation.
This wave understands relations between humans and objects as producing realities through
their intra-actions.
Knowledge is shown to be socially constructed, and objects are shown to be political actors.
Frauenberger describes how HCI can be understood as having outgrown its epistemological and
ontological commitments as it is “systematically struggling to keep up with what is empirically
observed”.
“Existing practices and theories are starting to show conceptional shortcomings in describing
and conceptualising the changes we see in our relationship with digital artefacts.”
Frauenberger proposes that as technologies literally became entangled in and with our
bodies and everyday lives, what is empirically observed becomes less possible to understand
and explain without the use of entanglement theories; we have reached what Kuhn refers
to as a “model crisis” as the existing practices and theories are starting to show
conceptional shortcomings in describing and conceptualising the changes we see in our
relationship with digital artefacts.
The fact that societal and technological developments mean that we are now never without our technological
devices therefore makes a shift to a perspective on users and their devices as “entangled”
relevant, particularly within the domain of self-tracking.
The complex relationships between people and their data produce complex lived experiences.
To this fourth wave of HCI, we contribute a method to understanding our relationships
with technologies that leans on the fact that we don’t know what we’ve got until it’s
gone.
Our hypothesis is that our relationships with technologies are so habitual and entangled
that we find it difficult to articulate the role of technological artefacts in our lives.
Taking things that we are used to having away reveals what they mean to us.
In our study, we focused on menstrual cycle tracking devices.
This is a typical design of most menstrual cycle tracking apps.
The user puts in data and the app uses algorithms to try to predict when events such as when
menstruation, ovulation and PMS will occur in the next cycle.
This is based upon an assumption that the menstrual cycle recurs regularly.
Users are also given medical information about the menstrual cycle through the app.
We used removal as a method to understand the role of menstrual cycle tracking technologies
in users lives in three different ways.
The first was as a hypothetical question where we asked 12 participants if they would be
willing to stop using their menstrual cycle tracking apps for a study.
All participants declined, but their reasons as to why they did not want to stop, and their
descriptions of what might happen if they were to stop was very insightful about what
their menstrual cycle tracking apps meant for them.
My co-author Amanda Karlsson and I also used removal as a method as an auto-ethnographic
study where we stopped using menstrual cycle tracking technologies that we’d been using
for over three years.
In our paper we use one entanglement theory, feminist scholar Elizabeth Grosz’s embodied
subjectivity to understand how our experience of removing menstrual cycle tracking technologies
tells us something specific about our entanglements with technologies.
She states how The body is never “fixed, a-historical, or pre-cultural” and that
we can never experience our bodies “in the raw”.
Our findings relate to how our use of menstrual cycle tracking technologies shaped our experience.
Rather than seeing removal as a deletion of a device, as though it were possible to return
to a state pre-use, or even reveal a “natural” body, we apply removal to disturb existing
entanglements in order to produce knowledge about the particular ways in which we are
entangled.
Our autoethnographic study showed that once we had internalized menstrual cycle information,
we did not need to access it again in order to interpret our physiological sensations.
This information, (such as ovulation increasing libido, or PMS being experienced as depression
or anxiety) remained in our memory and influenced our experience of our bodies.
We continued to interpret our visceral sensations in relation to our memory of our previous
menstrual cycles and the textual and graphical information and predictions of patterns Clue
had provided us.
During our interviews with our potential participants, many also predicted that they would not forget
what they had learnt from their menstrual cycle tracking apps.
Our own experience during the first month after removing our menstrual cycle tracking
apps from our lives revealed how our experience of our bodies had been shaped through our
use of our apps.
Once our tracking apps had been removed, we were left us only with our physical sensations
to work out where we were in our menstrual cycles.
This meant that we became hyper aware of our bodies.
When we discussed stopping menstrual cycle tracking with our participants, several predicted
that their bodies and physical sensations would become more present to them after stopping
their menstrual cycle tracking practices.
P6 considered that not using her app could prompt her to “think more about what's happening
in my body” We were “hyper aware of every twinge of
pain in my stomach… being forced to use a muscle in your body that you normally don’t
use … like putting away your glasses and forcing the eye to see by itself”.”
“When my period came, I felt a rush of relief.
I was once again able to know for certain where I was in my menstrual cycle and regained
control of my body” One things we both felt was out of control of ourselves and desperate
to regain control.
This reflects societal expectations of bodies, and particularly the menstruating body to
be controlled.
This was inspite of the fact that we could not change or affect our menstrual cycles
simply by tracking them.
Not being able to track our menstrual cycle troubled our sense of self - we’d lost a
rational explanation for the emotions that we were experiencing and so the PMS phenomenon
bled into all aspects of life. It was no longer confined to a specific period of time.
We found it hard to know the distinction between what was really us and what was our hormones
influencing how we felt.
“Losing track of time felt like losing track of me…
I started doubting decisions I had made; am I feeling like this because I just moved in
with my partner or is it PMS?”
Removal as a method proved to be a useful tool in revealing relationships with technologies
that we were previously unaware of, even as a hypothetical question.
One of our interview participant’s reactions to our request that she stop tracking was;
“this question made me think “wow, I’m really dependent on these apps, I should chill
with that” I want to put more and more info, in a way I think to control my life.
To have more control of what is going on with my body”.
Not only do the findings from our use of removal as a method support Frauenberger’s call
for the necessity of different conceptual perspectives in HCI in order to avoid a model
crisis, but we also offer a humble proposal for how we might do entanglement HCI research
in practice.
Fourth-wave, entanglement HCI is based in an epistemology that “elevates the role
of the non-human world from a passive backdrop to human activity, to active contributors
to relational action as it unfolds”.
Our research is driven by the question: shouldn’t our research methods adapt to new paradigms
in HCI?
Once we adopt the conceptual perspective that users are entangled in their interactions
with devices, then we must question whether our research methods are adequate for understanding
these entanglements.
Removal as a method highlights the role technologies have in shaping our experience of our bodies
even after they are removed. Thank you.