Ambiguity as a resource to inform proto-practices: The case of skin conductance
2019 (English)In: ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, ISSN 1073-0516, E-ISSN 1557-7325, Vol. 26, no 4, article id 21Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]
Skin conductance is an interesting measure of arousal level, largely unfamiliar to most end-users. We designed a mobile application mirroring end-users’ skin conductance in evocative visualizations, purposefully made ambiguous to invite rich interpretations. Twenty-three participants used the system for a month. Through the lens of a practice-based analysis of weekly interviews and the logged data, several quite different—sometimes even mutually exclusive—interpretations or proto-practices arose: as stress management; sports performance; emotion tracking; general life logging; personality representation; or behavior change practices. This suggests the value of a purposefully open initial design to allow for the emergence of broader proto-practices to be followed by a second step of tailored design for each identified goal to facilitate the transition from proto-practice to practice. We contribute to the HCI discourse on ambiguity in design, arguing for balancing openness and ambiguity with scaffolding to better support the emergence of practices around biodata.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Association for Computing Machinery , 2019. Vol. 26, no 4, article id 21
Keywords [en]
Ambiguity, Biofeedback, Data, Emotion, Open-ended design, Practice theory, Proto-practices, Skin conductance, Sports, Stress, Wearables, Scaffolds, Stresses, Open-ended designs, Practice theories
National Category
Natural Sciences
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:ri:diva-39653DOI: 10.1145/3318143Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-85069516500OAI: oai:DiVA.org:ri-39653DiVA, id: diva2:1341038
Note
Funding details: Lancaster University; Funding details: 722022; Funding details: Stiftelsen för Strategisk Forskning, SSF, RIT15-0046; Funding details: Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan, KTH; Funding text 1: This work has been supported by AffecTech: Personal Technologies for Affective Health, Innovative Training Network funded by the H2020 People Programme under Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 722022 and the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research project RIT15-0046. Authors’ addresses: P. Sanches and K. Höök, Media Technology and Interaction Design, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, 100 44 Stockholm, Sweden; C. Sas, School of Computing and Communications and Institute for Social Futures, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK; email: c.sas@lancaster.ac.uk; A. Ståhl, RISE Research Institutes of Sweden AB, ICT SICS, Box 1263, SE-164 29 Kista, Sweden. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org. © 2019 Association for Computing Machinery. 1073-0516/2019/07-ART21 $15.00 https://doi.org/10.1145/3318143
2019-08-072019-08-072023-05-09Bibliographically approved