Elsa Kosmack Vaara

Mind the body!: designing a mobile stress management application encouraging personal reflection

We have designed a stress management biofeedback mobile service for everyday use, aiding users to reflect on both positive and negative patterns in their behavior. To do so, we embarked on a complex multidisciplinary design journey, learning that: detrimental stress results from complex processes related to e.g. the subjective experience of being able to cope (or not) and can therefore not be measured and diagnosed solely as a bodily state. We learnt that it is difficult, sometimes impossible, to make a robust analysis of stress symptoms based on biosensors worn outside the laboratory environment they were designed for. We learnt that rather than trying to diagnose stress, it is better to mirror short-term stress reactions back to them, inviting their own interpretations and reflections. Finally, we identified several experiential qualities that such an interface should entail: ambiguity and openness to interpretation, interactive history of prior states, fluency and aliveness.

Experiential artifacts as a design method for somaesthetic service development

How can deep understandings of material properties, limitations and possibilities be used concretely as a resource in the design of embodied experiences? How can material explorations spur and potentially direct, inspire, open up for new technologies and innovations? How can we identify, develop, and polish desirable core mechanics for embodied experiences and what kind of mobile services can be built with these experiences? In this position paper we describe our idea of experiential artifacts, and how we think these can help us open up the design space of the next generation of physically engaging mobile technologies.

Changing perspectives of time in HCI

The aim of this workshop is to unpack different ways of thinking about time, drawing a distinction between time as experienced, and time as counted by a ticking clock or measured by a computer algorithm. The concept of time is often taken for granted within HCI, yet highlighting the assumptions that underpin it could provide a resource for research and innovation. In this extended abstract, we illustrate how this is so.

Temporal relations in affective health

In the Affective Health project we explore possibilities of how to, through biofeedback support users in making sense of the relationship between their stress and their behavior in everyday life. Affective Health is a tool for visualizing patterns and trends of bodily and contextual information. It is particularly important that the design reflects changes over time as this is how people start recognizing patterns in their own behavior and connect it to their bodily reactions. We spent substantial effort sketching and testing ways of portraying time that would move us away from more mathematically inspired representations such as for example graphs and calendars. Instead, we want users to see the signals our bodies emit as part of themselves, of their own ways of being in the world, alive, acting and reacting to their environment. We have explored many possible, alternative ways of visualizing biofeedback over time. For example as the relation between different places and with time as different layers of history in a concept inspired from ecology. The latest and most developed concept is a cyclic repetition of biodata mapped on a spiral shape.

Mirroring bodily experiences over time

The Affective Health system is a mobile lifestyle application that aims to empower people to reflect on their lives and lifestyles. The system logs a mixture of biosensor-data and other contextually oriented data and transforms these to a colorful, animated expression on their mobiles. It is intended to create a mirror and thereby empower users to see activity patterns and relate these to their experiences of stress. Peoples different cultural backgrounds and their different physiological and psychological composition give them different perceptions and associations of time. We explore the time dimension of our system through working through a set of different designs that organize events as time going linearly forward, in a circular movement or relating to geographical places. Here we discuss the process of designing a mobile interface for presenting temporal data in a way that allows multiple and subjective interpretation.

IWS: interacting with sound: a workshop exploring context-aware, local and social audio applications

In this workshop, we explore novel applications, services, tools, and systems that take advantage of the audio channel on mobile devices to feed users with a flow of information. We call for innovative ideas to introduce ambient context-aware, location-aware, and/or social audio as a more effective means of communicating information and providing experiences to mobile users.