Many people track their behaviors, context, and outcomes to understand and manage their health. Despite some successes, many people still experience misalignments between their goals and what their health tracking tools support. Successful reflection and action depend on foundations early in the tracking process, such as understanding and scaffolding for an individual’s goals.
As they work to make sense of and act on their data, people also turn to clinicians and other health experts for support in understanding and acting on their data. They also may need to collaborate and coordinate with peers, family members, and others for support, shared decision making, and acting together. These collaborations can bring additional challenges and opportunities for goal misalignments.
In this talk, I will discuss how common sources of goal misalignment in health tracking technologies and their uses. I will then show how a goal-directed approach to designing and using personal informatics tools can lead to lower burdens, improved understanding, and greater success in using personal informatics tools. Finally, I encourage caution focusing too much on data, or on designs that treat all problems as self-knowledge problems. There is an opportunity for our field to advance techniques for reflection that leads to advocacy for upstream, societal-level changes.
11:45am - 12:15pm: Food and community socializing.
12:15pm - 1:15: Presentation with Q&A. Available hybrid via Zoom.
1:15pm - 2:00pm: Student meeting and discussion with speaker.
Dr. Sean Munson is a Professor at the University of Washington’s Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering. Working on challenges of health, wellbeing, and exposure to diverse information, Sean designs and evaluates techniques for helping people make sense of data about themselves and the world around them. He focuses on the challenges of designing for collaboration and coordination, to bring together the different expertise necessary to understand and act on these data. Sean’s research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Agency for Healthcare Research & Quality, the National Institutes of Health, the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, and Google. He is the recipient of a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award and is a Distinguished Member of the ACM. In addition to his research and teaching, Sean directs the HCDE PhD program, previously chaired the HCI+D Interdisciplinary Faculty Group, is a member of the DUB group, and co-directs the UW ALACRITY Center. Sean completed a BS in Engineering at Olin College in 2006 and his PhD at the University of Michigan School of Information in 2012. Previously, he was a political blogger and, while at Boeing, designed concepts for future passenger airplane interiors.