Welcome to our talk my name is Nathalie and I’ll present our paper data every day: designing
and living with personal situated visualizations.
This is a collaboration between myself, Jo Vermeulen, and Wesley Willett.
Throughout their history, visualization tools have predominantly aimed to communicate ideas
and solve problems in professional settings.
Even today, visualization systems target mainly traditional desktop and office use cases.
Over the past decade, however, a growing number of personal informatics and visualization
tools have started to enable data collection and exploration at more personal scales.
These tools, however, still mainly rely on automated sensor-driven data collection and
take the form of desktop and mobile applications that are often isolated from the tasks and
phenomena they visualize.
In this paper, we instead examine the potential of dedicated visualizations, situated in relevant
physical spaces that support lightweight manual input.
For example
to track and reflect daily hygiene habits
kitchen experiments
or even everyday clothing choices in lightweight, contextually-relevant ways.
By situating these visualizations in existing environments, these trackers have the potential
to make it possible to record and visualize data in-situ and to embed trackers into people’s
existing practices to support a variety of everyday tasks.
We conceived this project as a way of exploring the potential for personalized and situated
visualization tools to support a range of everyday reflections and tasks.
Specifically, we hoped to envision new and wide-ranging applications for personal informatics
enabled by emerging technologies like ubiquitous displays that make it possible to situate
information throughout everyday domestic and work environments.
To achieve this, our design process consisted of multiple phases
First, a five-month autobiographical design study with me and my two co authors.
Employing an autobiographical design approach was motivated by our personal interest in
self-tracking and enabled us to gain deep insights into the long-term usage and impact
of trackers in our personal spaces and allowed us to rapidly prototype and tinker with a
range of different tracking applications.
Second, a three-month complementary co-design study where we created trackers together with
six participants.
This approach enabled us to give participants an active role in the design process so that
they could shape their tracker designs and tailor them to their unique living situations.
This was followed by an extended use phase of a subset of the trackers for another five
months by both authors and participants.
We used an iterative design process to create our tracking applications where we prototyped
trackers in weekly design cycles that were organized around three phases: planning, prototyping,
and use and reflection.
We kept this design process for both the autobiographical design part and the co-design part of the
study.
We additionally supported participants through an initial brainstorming meeting to come up
with a tracker design and conducted an interviews after a period of use.
We prototyped the trackers on smartphones, tablets, and e-readers using web technologies.
We served the web pages from a remote host and displayed the trackers in the phone’s
web browsers.
To capture our experiences and reflections, we used a diary study approach for our own
trackers and participants’ trackers.
We structured our process around four design goals:
All of the trackers we designed, combine visualization and data input on a dedicated
and persistent always-on display to support peripheral use and streamline the data entry
process like this communal plant watering tracker in an office space that was situated
next to a sink
All of our trackers were relevantly situated to examine the impact of placing trackers
in locations that would be relevant to the tracking and the phenomena we were capturing
like situating a cookie tracker next to a cookie jar.
To capture a diverse range of lived experiences that might otherwise be difficult to instrument
we designed all of our trackers to support lightweight manual inputs to track data like
this static door shock tracker in an office space space where data could be tracked data
by pressing the “yes” or “no” buttons
Lastly, we focused on simple, modular, and customizable tracker designs that are easy
to adapt, iterate, and personalize to be able to experiment with a broad range of potential
applications,
We ended up with 30 different trackers, 21 from the autobiographical design phase and
9 from participants In addition to the previous examples, the
tracked phenomena ranged from
work habits and productivity
family health like tracking diapers
To whereabouts of a cat in an apartment.
Over the course of ten months, we recorded a total of 2941 data points across all designs,
with the total number per tracker ranging from 6 to 442
The most-used tracker recorded data points on 209 different days, while the least-used
included only a single day
In the following, I will highlight a selection of our findings that we distilled based on
the material we collected including diary entries from authors and participants, researchers'
notes, photographs and screenshots of trackers, and interviews.
We found that tracking data on dedicated displays situated in relevant locations facilitated
regular tracking habits and often served as a reminder to reflect.
like placing trackers close to relevant objects such as this jar of a fermentation project
in the kitchen where the tracked phenomena took place.
In some cases, however, persistent situated displays were less useful when personal devices
were already part of tracking routines, or when the tracked phenomenon was difficult
to situate anywhere, but on the person themselves such as this license plate tracker…
These kinds of small, situated, personal visualizations and tracking tools can support a wide range
of everyday self-tracking, awareness, and decision making tasks— creating opportunities
for future research to explore new lightweight personal informatics tools in everyday settings
using both existing mobile devices and dedicated hardware.
While some of our trackers were uniquely tailored to specific tasks, others were more general
in their visual design.
Throughout the design process, we reused a number of existing tracker designs by adapting
them to different scenarios like repurposing our streak trackers to different applications
to track exercise, rain, or biking.
Overall, our experience suggests that a small number of tracker templates can support
a diverse set of tracking practices especially trackers that are end-user customizable.
The trackers that could most easily be templated, include our streak trackers, timeline trackers,
and image-based trackers.
Throughout our process, we used a number of different trackers that we reused, abandoned,
and adapted and tweaked in multiple iterations like this door shock tracker.
This allowed us to quickly converge on trackers that actively supported both short-term and
long-term tracking goals.
Our experience of designing and living with our trackers showcases ways of thinking about
personal data that more explicitly acknowledge the pragmatics of everyday life and treat
abandonment, re-use, and tweaking as natural parts of the design process — where these
kinds of personal lightweight trackers are evolving tools for self-awareness and decision-making,
rather than solutions.
Our explorations present long-term insights of designing and living with personal situated
visualizations on small displays.
Our findings also highlighting the value of simple, expressive, and adaptable designs
and the potential of new hardware platforms and data sources.
For more of our findings on visual design, data entry, and customization please refer
to our paper.
You can also find the the code of our trackers on Github.
Thank you