Personal reflection with biosensing machines, such as step counters or heart rate sensors, places human and machine into a collaborative relationship of creating and interpreting data. Biosensory data are at once intimate and interpersonal, embodied and abstracted, objective and subjective, posing unique challenges for data analysis for personal meaning making. My work explores collaborative human-machine interpretation with biosensing. I design material representations of biosensory data and study the interpretive relationships humans develop with these in daily life, such as colorchanging clothing that responds to the skin conductance of the wearer. Different materials suggest different associations and interpretations, fostering different kinds of “interpretive relationships” than typical data analysis of a graph on a screen. Although personal reflection may not typically be construed as creative practice, I posit that important parallels exist and would like to explore these further by participating in this workshop.
Copyright © 2017 for this paper is held by the author(s). Proceedings of MICI 2017: CHI Workshop on Mixed-Initiative Creative Interfaces.
Biosensing; thermochromic; reflective design.
H.5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI): Miscellaneous.
Biosensing is on the rise in daily life. For example, the Feel wristband monitors skin conductance, pulse, and temperature to track mood and give wellness advice [18], and Affectiva uses facial analysis to detect emotions [19]. Prevailing trends in biosensing promote individualistic, algorithmically defined emotions, wellness, and self-improvement. My stance is that this alone is far too limiting, and that biosensing designs should foreground the subjective, creative process of personal meaning making in order to support a multiplicity of values, experiences, and interpretations. Interfaces for personal reflection with biosensory data tend toward two extremes: At one end, a time series graph of a physiological signal with no added annotation frames the data as passively observed fact and provides no guidance for human sensemaking. At the other end, some devices impose their own interpretation such as “happiness” or “stress” (e.g., [18,20]), leaving little space for human-driven emotional meaning making. So, interfaces tend to give the machine too little or too much initiative in the process of personal meaning making with biosensing. I believe mixed initiative creative interfaces and personal reflection with biosensing have some interesting parallels, and that participating in this workshop could greatly inform my work. Creative practice can be part of meaning making, self expression, exploration, or contribute to one’s sense of identity, and so too can personal reflection. Rather than viewing personal reflection as some deterministic process of seeking one’s single true self, I see it more as an ongoing process of exploring and creating multiple possible aspects of one’s identity. These explorations manifest in the mind, in social interactions, and through creative expression. Some core aspects of personality or identity may be fixed, but personal growth is a lifelong creative process.
Beyond personal reflection, other work has explored
enrolling biosensing for creative expression, such as
accelerometers or heart rate sensors worn by dancers
that influence timbre or rhythm for musicians (e.g.,
[
My work focuses on personal reflection with biosensing while drawing from the reconceptualizations described above. I design for collaborative interpretive relationships between human and machine, where each has some initiative in meaning making. As part of this, I try to reveal the initiative, agency, or decisions already being made by biosensing machines. Although often framed as “facts” passively observed from the natural environment, biosensory data are coconstructed by our bodies in contact with a sensor, algorithms in the hardware, and the manner in which they are displayed. The human efforts and inescapably political decisions of engineers, scientists, and designers went into creating an electrical signal, deciding it was worthy of study, and presenting it. Revealing some of this embedded machine initiative may open up more of a dialogue in which humans feel they can question, challenge, and more freely interpret biosensory data.
Overall, my designs foster interactions in which human, machine, and material initiatives are significantly different than in more typical consumer devices for personal reflection with biosensing. Rather than a time series graph or discrete emotional categories, the machine’s display is a more ambiguous abstract pattern and more open to human initiative in interpretation. Rather than the hard fast-switching material of electronic screens, the softer slower thermochromic fabrics evoke different associations.
My work mixes machine, human, and material
initiatives for personal reflection, engaging the physical
properties of dynamic materials, such as
thermochromic fabrics [
With Ebb [1] in collaboration with Project Jacquard
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http://doi.org/10.1145/1142405.1142422 17. Anna Vallgårda and Johan Redström. 2007.
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http://doi.org/10.1145/1240624.1240706 18. Feel. Retrieved January 12, 2016 from
http://www.myfeel.co/ 19. Affectiva. Retrieved from
http://www.affectiva.com/ 20. Spire. Spire. Retrieved May 24, 2016 from http://www.spire.io