Data Agents: Promoting Reflection through Meaningful Representations of Personal Data in Everyday Life

Visual and physical representations of historical personal data have been discussed as artifacts that can lead to self-reflection through meaning-making. However, it is yet unclear how those two concepts relate to each other. We focus on meaningfulness, a part of meaning-making that relates to feelings. In this paper, we present three projects where mundane objects, our data agents, are combined in meaningful ways with personal data with the aim to trigger reflection by placing a person's individual experience of data in relation to others'. To identify relationships between self-reflection and meaningfulness we use Fleck and Fitzpatrick's framework to describe the levels of reflection that we found in our projects and Mekler and Hornbæk's meaning framework to define the depth of reflection. We conclude with a discussion on four themes in which we outline how data agents informed the intersections between our central concepts. This paper constitutes a first step towards unpacking those relationships and invites for further explorations by the HCI community.

DOI

10.1145/3411764.3445112

Citation

Karyda , M , Mekler , E & Lucero , A 2021 , Data Agents: Promoting Reflection through Meaningful Representations of Personal Data in Everyday Life . in CHI 2021 - Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. : Making Waves, Combining Strengths . ACM , ACM SIGCHI Annual Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems , Yokohama , Japan , 08/05/2021 . https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445112

Permanent link to this item

https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:aalto-2021110410011

Collections

[article-cris] Perustieteiden korkeakoulu / SCI

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