Prior to the main ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, more commonly known as CHI, a variety of related workshops were held in Paris. Lisa Koeman took part in the Personal Informatics in the Wild: Hacking Habits for Health & Happiness workshop after her submission ‘Enabling Foresight and Reflection: Interactive Simulations to Support Behaviour Change’ was accepted.

The two-day Personal Informatics workshop was held at the Université Paris Dauphine and started off with 4-minute presentations from all attendees. Here, I presented the concept of ‘foresight’: the explicit visualisation of predictions. Such foresight can offer people insight into the consequences behaviour changes will have in the future. Current personal informatics tools mainly focus on providing users with visualisations of their previously collected data. Combined with goal-setting, (dis)incentives, and competitions or comparisons with other users, it is hoped users will become or remain motivated to change. Supporting people by enabling them to explore the effects of theoretical or actual behaviour changes has so far remained unexplored. If and how foresight can help will be addressed in the project around creating Interactive Visualisations of Urban Lifestyles.

The topics addressed by the attendees varied greatly, ranging from discussions on the ethical issues around persuading users, to designing a well-being monitoring application for residents of an elderly home. A complete listing of accepted papers can be found on the workshop’s website.

Following the presentations, the remaining time was spent on a “hackathon”. In the weeks before the workshop, groups were formed, and equipment of choice could be ordered (Arduinos, heart rate monitors, Jawbones, etc.). Groups were free to focus on any topic around personal informatics and deliverables of the workshop could range from paper prototypes and presentations to working applications.

My group focused on the issues around the long term usage of personal informatics tools, and how systems should adapt to both the individual’s setting and the time course of use. After filling up whiteboard after whiteboard with ideas, and exhausting all available post-its, we ended up creating a ‘Family Informatics Model’. We are planning to continue working on this idea, as will no doubt many of the other groups. The final workshop day ended with group presentations and a meetup at Quantified Self Paris for those interested. Despite flaky WiFi connections and a power outage, the Personal Informatics workshop proved to be a productive and very inspiring get-together.

My workshop submission can be found here and my presentation here.