Speculating on Social Interactions with Personal Informatics
Background
From the Changing Goals study, key insights showed an opportunity to design personal informatics to support social circles:
Most personal informatics (PI) tools struggle to adapt to changing goals, which can undermine confidence and lead people to pause or abandon their health tracking altogether.
Health goal pursuit is deeply social, shaped by interactions with family, friends, and peers — yet PI tools are typically designed for individuals and rarely leverage social circles in meaningful ways.
This study explores how future PI tools could support goal setting and goal change through social interactions, using speculative design and provocative scenarios.
We identify key tensions and design implications for PI tools. Our findings offer actionable insights for designing adaptable, socially aware systems that better support changing health goals.
Research Question
How can personal informatics support social interactions for goal setting and goal change?
What is Speculative Design?
Study Design
Goal Contemplations
Goal Contemplations place’s goal setting and goal change as a shared reflective experience in a sacred-like space, inspired from spiritual settings. The space is envisioned to be architecturally similar to a church or temple to facilitate relating the importance and seriousness of people’s health to places with significant historical prominence. This provocation explores the ease of goal setting, as reflections, goal options, and their possible outcomes, are guided by the space itself.