Today I presented our paper ‘Personal Tracking as Lived Informatics’ at CHI. By interviewing 22 people about how they were using personal tracking devices, such as Nike Fuelband, Jawbone Up, FitBit, and mobile apps (e.g. RunKeeper and MyFitnessPal).

Among the findings, we uncover how the people we talk to use multiple trackers, and track multiple things. They switch between trackers, as well as what they track, over time. While they say that they do not share tracked data to social networks, they do track together with people in their lives. Furthermore, while they track for a long time, they rarely look at their historical data.

We discuss our findings and present an alternative view to Personal Informatics which we term Lived Informatics. Lived Informatics emphasises the emotionality of tracking and that tracking is something done with an outlook for the future, rather than part of a rational scientific process for optimising self as seen in Quantified Self and in Personal Informatics.

We are very happy the paper got an Honorable Mention.

The paper:

Rooksby, J., Rost, M., Morrison, A. and Chalmers, M. (2014) Personal Tracking as Lived Informatics. To appear in Proceedings of CHI’14, Toronto, Canada.

On friday I gave a guest lecture in a course at LinCS at the University of Gothenburg. The course was ‘Understanding and designing for social media practices’ and is aimed at exploring methods for studying online social media.

The lecture was based on two previous studies of foursquare. The first one was a primarily interview based study where we looked at performative aspects of using foursquare. The second one deals with a study of log data from foursquare. The talk discussed what it means for people to share their location through the means of checking in (or what it means to check in), and discussed what this means for the genera of data, and showed examples of communicative features in the log data from foursquare.

The slides can be found on slideshare.