You can access it as a standalone app or on Facebook. I’m just doing friends and family testing and some refinements on it for now, so feedback is welcome.

Alphabetical order.

• Adele, 21
• Beirut, The Rip Tide
• Blind Pilot, We Are the Tide
• Bon Iver, Bon Iver
• The Black Keys, El Camino (sadly, it may have come out too late to make some of the early top 10 lists for the year, and was severely underrated by Pitchfork)
• Cut Copy, Zonoscope
• The Decemberists, The King is Dead
• Florence + the Machine, Ceremonials
• The Mountain Goats, All Eternals Deck
• PJ Harvey, Let England Shake
• TV on the Radio, Nine Types of Light

Others that really deserve a mention: St. Vincent, Strange Mercy; Foster the People, Torches; Tennis, Cape Dory; Feist, Metals; Laura Marling, A Creature I Don’t Know; M83, Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming; Wye Oak, Civilian; Head and the Heart, Head and the Heart (really a 2010 release, but remastered and re-released on Sub Pop this year); Drake, Take Care; Destroyer, Kaputt.

Top 11 Movies

This has been a harder year for movies, with many of the best coming at the end.

• Contagion
• Drive
• Margin Call
• Mission Impossible Judge if you will. This movie, perhaps more than any of the other MI movies, knew what it was, embraced it, and was slickly made – making it a lot of fun. When it was ridiculous, I laughed with, rather than laughing at or cringing. Solid brain candy movie.
• Moneyball
• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
• Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
• 50-50

Honorable mentions: The Guard, Ides of March (very well made, but it doesn’t make the cut as it was rather depressing without adding anything), Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Midnight in Paris, The Adjustment Bureau (basically a running movie, not sure why I liked it as much as I did)

Movies I still want to see: Tintin, The Descendants.

11 other highlights

For reading this year, I really enjoyed Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together and Brian Christian’s The Most Human Human, and am looking forward to Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow. I was super-happy to start reading the Song of Ice and Fire series, and immensely enjoyed HBO’s Game of Thrones adaptation.

This year’s season of Breaking Bad was exceptionally good even for an overall exceptional series, as was the second season of Justified. Parks and Recreation continues to be perhaps the sweetest, funniest, consistent comedy on television. House continues to stay fresh, somehow. The BBC modern re-imagining of Sherlock is even better than House. Prime Suspect is the latest darker police procedural that I enjoy but will inevitably be canceled.

At the end of October, he critiqued Kim Brooks’s qualms about defriending people who post things like “Just turned off the t.v. More lies from B. Hussein Obama.” This sort of unfriending happens quite a bit on Facebook and Twitter (Sibona and Walczak 2010; Kwak, Chun, Moon 2011), but Brooks was wondering if she was creating a liberal echo chamber for herself, as she chooses to “simply opt out of such challenges, to crop the frame in whatever way suits our political orientation or cultural sensibility.” If many people come to rely on social streams to point them at their news — oh hello Facebook social reader (still one of their creepiest features as I experience it), hello Twitter — this sort of homophily would take Sunstein’s fears of a DailyMe and selective exposure and raises them to yet another level.

Pierce, however, says, no, this is a perfectly reasonable action. He argues that

…they’re low-information assholes, most of them, and they and their ilk have done untold damage to this country. It is alright to de-friend these people. It is alright never to have anything to do with them again. It is alright to believe that most of their ideas are half-baked, and the ones that aren’t are utterly vile, and all that you would ever learn from them is how to be as nasty a human being as you can be.

Like, I said, bombastic. And polarizing. Most of the comments are in agreement with Pierce’s point of view. The cynic in me thinks he might be right; posts like the one Brooks mentions really don’t have any bearing on my political opinions, other than to possibly reinforce them, though more thoughtful critiques might. I also really do believe that there is a point where others’ opinions get so vile, and so hardened, that one really ought to cut them out and disengage.The optimist in me, though, wants to say: no, this is the chance to engage, presumably you have some sort of other relationship to protect. This is what motivated my study of political discussion in non-political blogs. (& then the cynic in me responds, at which point, this will probably make *them* defriend *you*).

This leads to an issue I’d like to explore in my own work, or have others beat me to: when confronted with disagreeable political opinions in social media streams, (a) when can (and can’t) one engage to possibly affect opinion change, or at least reconsideration, and (b) how can one most effectively do so? From what we learn from that, are there ways to shape the Facebook feed or other streams to show people diverse views from friends that they can engage with, rather than that repulse them? I’ve worked a good deal on related questions in news aggregators, but as a lot of the action moves to Twitter and Facebook, these spaces, and understanding the ways to present and engage with a variety of opinions in them, become more important.

For each paper, the authors note the theories (if any) that were cited as guiding the development of the intervention. Most common were Theory of Planned Behavior, the Health Belief Model, Self-Determination Theory, Social Cognitive Theory, Self-Regulation Theory, the Transtheoretical Model, and cognitive-behavioral theory. The authors find that these theories are somewhat lacking for their ability to to guide the use of the affordances of mobile technology. In particular, theories based on linear progression tend not to take full advantage of mobile devices’ abilities for context awareness (through sensing and prompted input), increased variation in timing and content of interventions, and real-time awareness of outcomes.

While the health behavior theories may not be up to the task on their own, there are theories from a variety of disciplines that can guide, and are guiding, intervention designers. The authors suggest looking to control theory to address some of the shortcomings they identify, and offer a couple of interesting examples. The HCI and social computing community, which knows interactive systems and technology mediated social interaction, also has quite a bit to offer. Though HCI often borrows or adds to theories from other disciplines — including from the health community — it has developed quite a bit of expertise about how to implement these in systems, and developed its own applicable frameworks, such as the Reader to Leader Framework.

The way the authors found the literature they reviewed — a search of Medline — highlights a bit of a communication gap between these disciplines. No papers from HCI conferences or journals were included in this review, despite work such as UbiFit, MAHI, and Fish’n'Steps being excellent examples of the type of studies the authors reviewed. The authors are not alone in excluding HCI papers from review articles on this topic (e.g., [1], [2]). I agree, to a large extent, with Klasnja et al that deep understanding of users’ experiences with behavior change strategies, as implemented in a system, is one of the primary contributions HCI make can to this health behavior change work. Stopping at such findings, however, may be insufficient for the results to have an impact outside of the HCI community, much as eco-feedback work in HCI has not always reached beyond the HCI community.

Collaborations between the HCI and health communities, such as UCSD’s Center for Wireless & Population Health Systems, the iMed group at UW, or Northwestern’s newly announced Center for Behavioral Intervention Technologies, as well as boundary spanning venues such as WISH, Health 2.0, or the Designing for Healthy Living special issue of IJMI, are helping to close some of the gap between communities. We should, however, keep asking whether this will be enough.

We should also keep asking what might be on a research agenda that combines the strengths of HCI and health behavior change communities (or at least, I should, since I have a dissertation to write), with an eye toward advancing both theory and practice. Some thoughts:

• What are appropriate ways to elicit social support or social pressure from others on social network sites or other technology mediated spaces?
• When does anonymity support people trying to make healthy behavior changes, such as by helping them feel comfortable sharing, and when it is a barrier to making those changes, such as by reducing accountability?
• Are some types of nudges that work once or in non-discretionary use problematic over the long term, such as because people start avoiding the system and aversive feedback?
• How can we most effectively use leaderboards to support behavior change and maintenance? With data from many people, there are many more options for how to construct leaderboards than in smaller groups. For a given behavior or set of people, which comparison direction(s) and dimensions of similarity are most effective?
• How applicable are health behavior change theories to other behavior change domains, such as eco-feedback? Where do the existing theories apply, where do they break? We already see things like the health belief model being applied to computer security practices.
• As features used to nudge or support decision making become more widely adopted, do some feature remain effective or become like infrastructure while others become less effective?
• What are the privacy implications of integrating sensing, storage, and sharing of of data? Is HIPAA policy even up to this task?
• When do behavior nudges become coercive? What are good practices for ethics of these interventions? While many counseling strategies promote autonomy and intrinsic motivation as both a matter of efficacy and ethics, does this balance shift as devices that allow constant and long term monitoring (and thus control) become available? For example, some people can already save money on their insurance by agreeing to wear a pedometer and meeting certain step goals.

These are by no means completely open questions. Researchers and practitioners in both communities have been tackling many of them and making progress. It is also by no means a complete list.

I agree with a lot of Nick’s thoughts. Having validated reading behavior is useful – though it’s also interesting to get the difference between what topics people read and what topics people want others to know they read. As Nick points out, it might be a way for people to communicate to others that they are an expert on a topic – or at least an informed reader, as I suspect that experts may have other channels for following the topics about which they care most.

Though BunchBall sort of looks down on the quantified self aspect, I do think it’s useful to give people feedback on what they are reading (sort of like last.fm) for news topics rather than what they think they read, though badges probably aren’t quite as data-rich as I’d want. At Michigan, we’re trying a similar experiment as part of the BALANCE project shortly, to assess whether feedback on past reading behavior affects the balance of political articles that subjects read.

If people do care about earning the badges, either to learn about their reading behavior or to share with others as a sign of their expertise or interests, then they’ll probably read more of their news through Google news – so that it is tracked in more detail. Thus, a win for Google, who gets the pageviews and data.

Google, why do you want me to earn a Kindle badge?

Whatever the case, this highlights a way that badges could push reading behavior – assuming that people want to earn, or want to avoid earning, badges. This can run both ways. Maybe someone is motivated by gadget badges and so reads more about Kindles; maybe someone doesn’t think of themselves as interested in celebrities or media and is thus pushed to read fewer articles about those topics than they were before. I’m not saying this is bad, per se, as feedback is an important part of self-regulation, but if badges matter to people, the simple design choice of which badges to offer (and promote) will be influential, just as the selection and presentation of articles are.

I really like the idea of using browser plugins to annotate information people encounter in their regular online interactions. This is something we’re doing on a variety of projects here, including AffectCheck, BALANCE, and Rumors. I think that tools that combine personal data, in-situ, with more depth can teach people more about with whom and with what they are interacting, and this just in time presentation of information is an excellent opportunity to persuade and possibly to prompt reflection. Technically, it’s also a pretty nice implementation.

There are some reasons why this tool may not be so great, however. With Daniel Avrahami, Sunny Consolvo, James Fogarty, Batya Friedman, and Ian Smith, I recently published a paper about people’s attitudes toward the online availability of US public records, including campaign contribution records such as the ones on which Inbox Influence draws. Many respondents to our survey (mailed, no compensation, likely biased toward people who care more about this issue) expressed discomfort with these records being so easily accessible, and less than half (as of 2008) even knew that campaign contribution records were available online before they received the survey. Nearly half said that they wanted some sort of change, and a third said that this availability would alter their future behavior, i.e., they’d contribute less (take this with a grain of salt, since it is about hypothetical future behavior).

Unless awareness and attitudes have changed quite a bit from 2008, tools such as Inbox Influence create privacy violations. The data is being used and presented in ways that people did not anticipate at the time when they made the decision to donate, and at least some people are “horrified” or at least uncomfortable with this information being so easily accessible. Perhaps we just need to do better at educating potential donors about in what ways campaign contribution data may be used (and anticipate future mashups), though it is also possible that tools like this do not need to be made, or could benefit from being a bit more nuanced in when and about whom they load information.

Speaking personally, I’m not sure how I feel. On the one hand, I think that campaign contributions and other other actions should be open to scrutiny and should have consequences. If you take the money you earn from your business and donate it to support Prop 8, I want the opportunity to boycott your business. If you support a politician who wants to eviscerate the NSF, I might want to engage you in conversation about that. On the other hand, I don’t like the idea that my campaign contribution history (anything above the reporting limit) might be loaded automatically when I email a professional colleague or a student. That’s just not relevant—or even appropriate—to the context. And there are some friendships among political diverse individuals that may survive, in part, because those differences are not always made salient. So it also seems like Inbox Influence or tools that let you load, with a click, your Facebook friends’ contribution history, could sometimes cause harm.

More papers

• We’re in It Together: Interpersonal Management of Disclosure in Social Network Services
  Airi Lampinen, Vilma Lehtinen, Asko Lehmuskallio, Saraki Tamminen

  I possibly should have linked to this one in my post about social networks for health, as my work in that area is why this paper caught my attention. Through a qualitative study, the authors explore how people manage their privacy and disclosures on social network sites.

  People tend to apply their own expectations about what they’d like posted about themselves to what they post about others, but sometimes negotiate and ask others to take posts down, and this can lead to either new implicit or explicit rules about what gets posted in the future. They also sometimes stay out of conversations when they know that they are not as close to a the original poster as the other participants (even if they have the same “status” on the social network site). Even offline behavior is affected: people might make sure that embarrassing photos can’t be taken so that they cannot be posted.

  To regulate boundaries, some people use different services targeted at different audiences. While many participants believed that it would be useful to create friend lists within a service and to target updates to those lists, many had not done so (quite similar to my findings with health sharing: people say they want the feature and that it is useful, but just aren’t using it. I’d love to see Facebook data on what percent of people are actively using lists.) People also commonly worded posts so that those “in the know” would get more information than others, even if all saw the same post.

  Once aversive content had been posted, however, it was sometimes better for participants to ty to repurpose it to be funny or a joke, rather than to delete it. Deletions say “this was important,” while adding smilies can decrease its impact and say “oh, that wasn’t serious.”

• Utility of human-computer interactions: toward a science of preference measurement
  Michael Toomim, Travis Kriplean, Claus Pörtner, James Landay

  Many short-duration user studies rely on self-report data of satisfaction with an interface or tool, even though we know that self-report data is often quite problematic. To measure the relative utility of design alternatives, the authors place them on Mechanical Turk and measure how many tasks people complete on each alternative under differing pay conditions. A design that gets more work for the same or less pay implies more utility. Because of things like the small pay effect and its ability to crowd out intrinsic rewards, I’m curious about whether this approach will work better for systems meant for work rather than for fun, as well as just how far it can go – but I really do like the direction of measuring what people actually do rather than just what they say.

Perhaps it is my love of maps or my senior capstone project at Olin, but I have a love for location based services work, even if I’m not currently doing it.

• Opportunities exist: continuous discovery of places to perform activities
  David Dearman, Timothy Sohn, Khai N. Truong

• In the best families: tracking and relationships
  Clara Mancini, Yvonne Rogers, Keerthi Thomas, Adam N. Joinson, Blaine A. Price, Arosha K. Bandara, Lukasz Jedrzejczyk, Bashar Nuseibeh

  I’m wondering more and more if there’s an appropriate social distance for location trackers: with people are already very close, it is smothering, while with people who are too far, is it creepy? Thinking about preferences for Latitude, I wouldn’t want my family or socially distance acquaintances on there, but I do want friends who I don’t see often enough on there.

The session on Affective Computing had lots of good stuff.

• Identifying emotional states using keystroke dynamics
  Clayton Epp, Michael Lippold, Regan L. Mandryk

  Fairly reliable classifier for emotions, including confidence, hesitance, nervousness, relaxation, sadness, and tiredness, based on analysis of typing rhythms on a standard keyboard. One thing I like about this paper is it opens up a variety of systems ideas, ranging from fairly simple to quite sophisticated. I’m also curious if this can be extended to touch screens, which seems like a much more difficult environment.

• Affective computational priming and creativity
  Sheena Lewis, Mira Dontcheva, Elizabeth Gerber

  In a Mechanical Turk based experiment, showing people a picture that induced positive affect increased the quality of ideas generated — measured by originality and creativity — in a creativity task. Negative priming reduced comparison compared to positive or neutral priming. I’m very curious to see if this result is sustainable over time, with the same image or with different images, or in group settings (particularly considering the next paper in this list!)

• Upset now?: emotion contagion in distributed group
  Jamie Guillory, Jason Spiegel, Molly Drislane, Benjamin Weiss, Walter Donner, Jeffrey Hancock

  An experiment on emotional contagion. Introducing negative emotion led others to be more negative, but it also improved the group’s performance.

• Emotion regulation for frustrating driving contexts
  Helen Harris, Clifford Nass

We’ve seen a lot of research on priming in interfaces lately, most often in lab or mturk based studies. I think it’ll start to get very interesting when we start testing to see if that also works in long-term field deployments or when people are using a system at their own discretion for their own needs, something that has been harder to do in many past studies of priming.

I didn’t make it to these next few presentations, but having previously seen Steven talk about this work, it’s definitely a worth a pointer. The titles nicely capture the main points.

• Parallel Prototyping Leads to Better Design Results, More Divergence, and Increased Self-Efficacy
  Steven P. Dow, Alana Glassco, Jonathan Kass, Melissa Schwarz, Daniel L. Schwartz, Scott R. Klemmer
• Prototyping dynamics: sharing multiple designs improves exploration, group rapport, and results
  Steven P. Dow, Julie Fortuna, Dan Schwartz, Beth Altringer, Daniel L. Schwartz, Scott R. Klemmer

The same is true for Moira’s work:

• Social capital on facebook: differentiating uses and users
  Moira Burke, Robert Kraut, Cameron Marlow

Navel-Gazy Stuff

• RepliCHI: issues of replication in the HCI community
  Max L. Wilson, Wendy Mackay, Dan Russell, Ed Chi, Michael Bernstein, Harold Thimbleby

  Discussion about the balance between reproducing other studies in different contexts or prior to making “incremental” advances vs. a focus on novelty and innovation. Nice summary here. I think the panelists and audience were generally leading toward increasing the use of replication + extension in the training of HCI PhD students. I think this would be beneficial, in that it can encourage students to learn how to write papers that are reproducible, introduce basic research methods by doing, and may often lead to some surprising and interesting results. There was some discussion of whether there should be a repli.chi track alongside an alt.chi track. I’m a lot less enthusiastic about that – if there’s a research contribution, the main technical program should probably be sufficient, and if not, why is it there? I do understand that there’s an argument to be made that it’s worth doing as an incentive, but I don’t think that is a sufficient reason. Less addressed by the panel was that a lot of the HCI research isn’t of a style that lends itself to replication, though Dan Russell pointed out that some studies must also be taken on faith since don’t all have our own Google or LHC.

• The trouble with social computing systems research
  Michael Bernstein, Mark S. Ackerman, Ed Chi, Robert C. Miller

  alt.chi entry into the debate perceived issues with underrepresentation of systems work in CHI submissions and with how CHI reviewers treat systems work. As someone who doesn’t do “real” systems work — the systems I build are usually intended as research probes rather than contributions themselves) — I’ve been reluctant to say much on this issue for fear that I would talk more than I know. That said, I can’t completely resist. While I agree that there are often issues with how systems work is presented and reviewed, I’m not completely sympathetic to the argument in this paper.

  Part of my skepticism is that I’ve yet to be shown an example of a good systems paper that was rejected. This is not to say that these do not exist; the authors of the paper are speaking from experience and do great work. The majority of systems rejections I have seen are from reviewing, and the decisions have mostly seemed reasonable. Most common are papers that make a modest (or even very nice) systems contribution, tack on a poorly executed evaluation, and then make claims based on the evaluation that it just doesn’t support. I believe at least one rejection would have been accepted had the authors just left out the evaluation altogether, and I think a bad evaluation and unsupported claims should doom a paper unless they are excised (which maybe possible with the new CSCW review process).

  I was a little bit frustrated because Michael’s presentation seemed to gloss over the authors’ responsibilities to explain the merits of their work to the broader audience of the conference and to discuss biases introduced by snowball samples. The last point is better addressed in the paper, but I still feel that the paper still deemphasizes authors’ responsibility in favor of reviewers’ responsibility.

  The format for this presentation was also too constrained to have a particularly good discussion (something that was unfortunately true in most sessions with the new CHI time limits). The longer discussion about systems research in the CSCW and CHI communities that followed one of the CSCW Horizons sessions this year was more constructive and more balanced, perhaps because the discussion was anchored at least partially on the systems that had just been presented.

• When the Implication Is Not to Design (Technology)
  Eric P.S. Baumer, M. Six Silberman

  Note on how HCI can improve the way we conduct our work, particularly the view that there are problems and technical solutions to solve them. The authors argue that it may be better think of these as conditions and interventions. Some arguments they make for practice are: Value the implication not to design technology (i.e., that in some situations computing technology may be inappropriate), explicate unpursued avenues (explain alternative interventions and why they were not pursued), technological extravention (are there times when technology should be removed?), more than negative results (why and in what context did the system fail, ad what does that failure mean), and to not to stop building – just to be more reflective on why that building is occurring.

• Normative influences on thoughtful online participation
  Abhay Sukumaran, Stephanie Vezich, Melanie McHugh, Clifford Nass

  Two lab experiments on whether it is possible to foster more thoughtful commenting and participation by participants in online discussion forums by priming thoughtful norms. The first tested the effects of the behavior of other participants in the forum. The dependent variables were comment length, time taken to write the comments, and number of issue-relevant thoughts. Not surprisingly, being exposed to other thoughtful comments led people to make more thoughtful comments themselves. One of the audience members asked the question about whether this would break down with just one negative or less thoughtful comment (such as how merely one piece of litter seems to break down antilittering norms).

  The second study tested effects of visual, textual, and interaction design features on the same dependent variables. The manipulations included a more subdued vs. more playful visual design, differing CAPTCHAs (words positively correlated with thoughtfulness in the thoughtful condition and words negatively correlated with thoughtfulness in the unthoughtful condition), and different labels for the comment box. The design intended to provoke thoughtfulness did correspond to more thoughtful comments, suggesting that it is possible, at least in the lab, to design sites to prompt more thoughtful comments. For this second study in particular, I’m curious if these measures only work in the short term or if they would work in the long term and about the effects of each of the specific design features.

• I will do it, but I don’t like it: User Reactions to Preference-Inconsistent Recommendations
  Christina Schwind, Jürgen Buder, Friedrich W. Hesse

  This paper actually appeared a in health session, but I found that it spoke much more to the issues my colleagues and I are confronting in the BALANCE project. The authors begin with the observation that most recommender systems are intended to produce content that their users will like, but that this can be problematic. In the health and wellness domain, people sometimes need to hear information that might disagree with their perspective or currently held beliefs, and so it can be valuable to recommend disagreeable information. In this Mechanical Turk-based study, subjects were equally likely to follow preference-consistent and preference-inconsistent recommendations. Following preference-inconsistent recommendations did reduce confirmation bias, but people were happier to see preference-consistent recommendations. This raises the important question: subjects may have followed the recommendation the first time, but now that they know this system gives recommendations they might not like, will they follow the recommendations less often in the future, or switch to another system altogether?

• ConsiderIt: improving structured public deliberation
  Travis Kriplean, Jonathan T. Morgan, Deen Freelon, Alan Borning, Lance Bennett

  I really like the work Travis is doing with Reflect and ConsiderIt (which powers the Living Voters Guide) to promote more thoughtful listening and discussion online, so I was happy to see this WiP and am looking forward to seeing more!

• Computing political preference among twitter followers
  Jennifer Golbeck, Derek L. Hansen

  This work uses follow data for Congresspeople and others on Twitter to assess the “political preference” (see comment below) of Twitter users and the media sources they follow. This approach and the information it yields has some similarities to Daniel Zhou’s upcoming ICWSM paper and, to a lesser extent, Souneil Park’s paper from CSCW this year.

  One critique: despite ample selective exposure research, I’m not quite comfortable with this paper’s assumption that political preference maps so neatly to political information preference, partly because I think this may be an interesting research question: do people who lean slightly one way or the other prefer information sources that may be more biased than they are? (or something along those lines)

In addition to these papers, Ethan Zuckerman’s closing plenary, Desperately Seeking Serendipity, touched on the topics of serendipity and homophily extensively. Zuckerman starts by suggesting the reason that people like to move to cities – even at times when cities were really quite horrible places – is, yes, for more opportunities and choices, but also “to encounter the people you couldn’t encounter in your rural, disconnected lifestyle… to become a cosmopolitan, a citizen of the world.” He goes on, “if you wanted to encounter a set of ideas that were radically different than your own, your best bet in an era before telecommunications was to move to a city.” There reasons to question this idea of cities as a “serendipity engine,” though: even people in urban environments have extremely predictable routines and just don’t go all that many places. Encounters with diverse others may not as common as idealized.

He then shifts gears to discuss what people encounter online. He walks through the argument that the idea of a Freshman Fishwrap or Daily Me is possibly quite harmful as it allows people to filter to the news that they want. Adding in social filters or getting news through our friends can make this worse. While Sunstein is concerned about this leading to polarization within the US, Zuckerman is more concerned that it leads people to see only news about where they are and less news about other places or from outside perspectives. This trend might lead people to miss important stories.

I tend to agree with the argument that surfacing coincidences or manufacturing serendipity is an incredibly powerful capability of current technology. Many of the approaches that the design community has taken to achieve this are probably not the kind of serendipity Zuckerman is looking for. I love Dopplr’s notifications that friends are also in town, but the time I spend with them or being shown around by them is time that I’m less likely to have a chance encounter with someone local or a traveler from elsewhere. The ability to filter reviews by friends may make for more accurate recommendations, but I’m also less likely to end up somewhere a bit different. Even serendipity has been repurposed to support homophily

Now, it might be that the definition of serendipity that some of the design community hasn’t quite been right. As Zuckerman notes, serendipity usually means “happy accident” now – it’s become a synonym for coincidence – and that the sagacity part of the definition has been lost. Zuckerman returns to the city metaphor, arguing for a pedestrian-level view. Rather than building tools for only efficiency and convenience, build tools and spaces that maximize the chances to interact and mix. Don’t make filters hidden. Make favorites of other communities visible, not just the user’s friends. Zuckerman elegantly compares this last feature to the traces in a city: one does not see traces left just by one’s friends, no, but traces left by other users of the space, and this gives people a chance to wander from the path they were already on. One might also overlay a game on a city, to encourage people to explore more deeply or venture to new areas.

While I like these ideas, I’m a little concerned that they will lead to somewhat superficial exposure to the other. People see different others on YouTube, Flickr, or in the news, and yes, some stop and reflect, others leave comments that make fun of them, and many others just move on to the next one. A location-based game might get people to go to new places, but are they thinking about what it is like to be there, or are they thinking about the points they are earning? This superficiality is something I worry about in my own work to expose people to more diverse political news – they may see it, but are they really considering the perspective or gawking at the other side’s insanity? Serendipity may be necessary, but I question whether it is sufficient. We also need empathy: technology that can help people listen and see others’ perspectives and situations. Maybe empathy is part of the lost idea of sagacity that Zuckerman discusses — a sort of emotional sagacity — but whatever it is, I need to better know how to design for it.

For SI and UM students who really engage with this discussion and the interweaving of cities, technology, and flows, I strongly, strongly recommend ARCH 531 (Networked Cities).

• Fit4life: the design of a persuasive technology promoting healthy behavior and ideal weight
  Stephen Purpura, Victoria Schwanda, Kaiton Williams, William Stubler, Phoebe Sengers

  Fit4life is a hypothetical system that monitors users’ behavior using a variety of tactics in the Persuasive Systems Design model. After describing the system (in such a way that someone in the room commented made the audience “look horrified”), the authors transition to a reflection on persuasive technology research and design, and how such a design can “spiral out of control.” As someone working in this space, the authors hit on some of the aspects that leave me a bit unsettled: persuasion vs. coercion, individual good vs. societal good, whether people choose their own view points or are pushed to adopt those of the system designers, measurement and control vs. personal experiences and responsibility, and increased sensing and monitoring vs. privacy and surveillance and the potential to eliminate boundaries between front stage and back stage spaces. The authors also discuss how persuasive systems with very strong coaching features can reduce the opportunity for mindfulness and for their users to reflect on their own situation: people can simply follow the suggestions rather than weigh the input and decide among the options.

  This is a nice paper and a good starting point for lots of discussions. I’m a bit frustrated that it was presented in a different yet concurrent session as the session on persuasive technology for health. As such, it probably did not (immediately) reach the audience that would have led to the most interesting discussion about the paper. In many ways, it argued for a “think about what it is like to live with” rather than “pitch” approach to thinking about systems. I agree with a good bit of the potential tensions the authors highlight, but I think they are a bit harder on the persuasive tech community than appropriate: in general, persuasive tech folks are aware we are building systems intended to change behavior and that this is fraught with ethical considerations, while people outside of the community often do not think of their systems as persuasive or coercive, even when they are (again, I mean this in a Nudge, choice-environments sense. On the other hand, one presentation at Persuasive last year did begin with the statement “for the sake of this paper, set aside ethical concerns” (paraphrased), so clearly there is still room for improvement.

• Designing for peer involvement in weight management
  Julie Maitland, Matthew Chalmers

  Based on interviews with nineteen individuals, the authors present an overview of approaches for how to involve peers in technology for weight management. These approaches fall into passive involvement (norms and comparisons) and five types of active involvement (table 1 in the paper): obstructive (“don’t do it”), inductive (“you should do it”), proactive (“do it with me”), supportive (“I’ll do it too”), and cooperative (“let’s do it together”). The last category includes competition, though there was some disagreement during the Q&A about whether that is the right alignment. The authors also find gender- and role- based differences in perceived usefulness of peer-based interventions, such as differences in attitudes about competition.

  Designers could use these types of engagement to think about what their application are supporting well or not so well. Here, I wish the authors had gone a bit further in linking the types of involvement to the technical mechanisms or features of applications and contexts, as I think that would be a better jumping off point for designers. For those thinking about how to design social support into online wellness interventions, I think this paper, combined with Skeels et al, “Catalyzing Social Support for Breast Cancer Patients”, CHI 2010 and our own paper from CSCW 2011 (“‘It’s not that I don’t have problems, I’m just not putting them on Facebook’: Challenges and Opportunities in Using Online Social Networks for Health”), offer a nice high-level overview of some of the challenges and opportunities for doing so.

• Mining behavioral economics to design persuasive technology for healthy choices
  Min Kyung Lee, Sara Kiesler, Jodi Forlizzi

  A nice paper that evaluates different persuasive approaches for workplace snack selection. These include:

  • default choice: a robot showing all snack choices with equal convenience or the healthy one more visibly, or a website that showed all snack choices (in random order) or that paginated them, with healthy choices shown on the first page.
  • planning: asking people to order a snack for tomorrow rather than select at the time of consumption.
  • information strategy: showing calorie counts for each snack.

  As one would expect, default choice strategy was highly effective in increasing the number of people who chose the healthy snack (apples) rather than the unhealthy snack (cookies). The planning strategy was effective among people who had a healthy snacking lifestyle, while those who snacked unhealthily continued to choose cookies. Interestingly, the information strategy had no effect on healthy snackers and actually led healthy snackers to choose cookies more than they otherwise would have. The authors speculate that this is either because the healthy snackers overestimate the caloric value of cookies in the absence of information (and thus avoid them more), or because considering the healthy apple was sufficiently fulfilling even if they ultimately chose the cookie.

  Some questions the study leaves open are: would people behave they same if they had to pay for the snacks? what would happen in a longer term deployment? What would have happened if the cookies were made the default, particularly for otherwise healthy snackers?

• Side effects and “gateway” tools: advocating a broader look at evaluating persuasive systems
  Victoria Schwanda, Steven Ibara, Lindsay Reynolds, Dan Cosley

  Interviews with 20 Wii Fit users revela side effects of this use: some stop using it because it did not work while others stop because they go on to other, preferred fitness activities (abandonment as success), a tension between whether the Fit is viewed as a game or exercise tool (people rarely view it as both), and negative emotional impacts (particularly frustrating when the system misinterpreted some data, such as weight gains). One suggestion the authors propose is that behavior change systems might start with activities that better resemble games but gradually transition users to activities with fewer game-like elements, and eventually wean users off of the system all together. In practice, I’m not sure how this would work, but I like this direction because it gets at one of my main critiques of gamification: take away the game and its incentives (which my distract from the real benefits of changing one’s behavior) and the behavior reverts quite quickly.

• Means based adaptive persuasive systems
  Maurits Kaptein, Steven Duplinsky, Panos Markopoulos

  Lab experiment evaluating the effects of using multiple sources of advice (single expert or consensus of similar others) at the same time, disclosing that advice is intended to persuade, and allowing users to select their source of advice. (This is framed more generally as about persuasive systems, but I think the framing is too broad: it’s really a study about advice.) Results: people are more likely to follow advice when they choose the source, people are less likely to follow advice when they are told that it is intended to persuade, and when shown expert advice and consensus advice from similar others, subjects were less likely to follow the advice than when they were only shown expert advice — regardless of whether the expert and consensus advice concurred with each other. This last finding is surprising to me and to the authors, who suggest that it may be a consequence of the higher cognitive load of processing multiple sources of advice; I’d love to see further work on this.

• Opportunities for computing technologies to support healthy sleep behaviors
  Eun Kyuong Choe, Sunny Consolvo, Nathaniel F. Watson, Julie A. Kientz

  Aggregation of literature review, interviews with sleep experts, a survey of 230 individuals, and 16 potential users to learn about opportunities and challenges for designing sleep technologies. The work leads to a design framework that considers the goal of the individual using the system, the system’s features, the source of the information supporting the design choices made, the technology used, and stakeholders involved, and the input mechanism. During the presentation, I found myself thinking a lot about two things: (1) the value of design frameworks and how to construct a useful one (I’m unsure of both) and (2) how this stacks up against Julie’s recent blog post that is somewhat more down on the opportunities of tech for health.

• How to evaluate technologies for health behavior change in HCI research
  Predrag Klasnja, Sunny Consolvo, Wanda Pratt

  The authors argue that evaluating behavior change systems based solely on whether they changed the behavior is not sufficient, and often infusible. Instead, they argue, HCI should focus on whether systems or features effectively implement or support particular strategies, such as self-monitoring or conditioning, which can be measured in shorter term evaluations.

  I agree with much of this. I think that more useful HCI contributions in this area speak to which particular mechanisms or features worked, why and how they worked, and in what context one might expect them to work. Contributions that throw the kitchen sink of features at a problem and do not get into the details of how people reacted to the specific features and what they features accomplished may tell us that technology can help with a condition, but do not, in general, do a lot to inform the designers of other systems. I also agree that shorter-term evaluations are often able to show that particular feature is or is not working as intended, though longer term evaluations are appropriate to understand if it continues to work. I am also reminded of the gap between the HCI community and the sustainability community pointed out by Froehlich, Findlater, and Landay at CHI last year, and fear that deemphasizing efficacy studies and RCTs will limit the ability of the HCI community to speak to the health community. Someone is going to have to do the efficacy studies, and the HCI community may have to carry some of this weight in order for our work to be taken seriously elsewhere. Research can make a contribution without showing health improvements, but if we ignore the importance of efficacy studies, we imperil the relevance of our work to other communities.

• Reflecting on pills and phone use: supporting awareness of functional abilities for older adults
  Matthew L. Lee, Anind K. Dey

  Four month deployment of a system for monitoring medication taking and phone use in the homes of two older adults. The participants sought out anomalies in the recorded data; when they found them, they generally trusted the system and focused on explaining why it might have happened, turning first to their memory of the event and then to going over their routines or other records such as calendars and diaries. I am curious if this trust would extend to a purchased product rather than one provided by the researchers (if so, this could be hazardous in an unreliable system); I could see arguments for it going each way.

  The authors found that these systems can help older remain aware of their functional abilities and helped them better make adaptations to those abilities. Similar to what researchers have recommended for fitness journals or sensors, the authors suggest that people be able to annotate or explain discrepancies in their data and be able to view it jointly. They also suggest highlighting anomalies and showing them with other available contextual information about that date or time.

• Power ballads: deploying aversive energy feedback in social media
  Derek Foster, Conor Linehan, Shaun Lawson, Ben Kirman

  I generally agree with Sunny Consolvo: feedback and consequences in persuasive systems should generally range from neutral to positive, and have been reluctant (colleagues might even say “obstinate”) about including it in GoalPost or Steps. Julie Kientz’s work, however, finds that certain personalities think they would respond well to negative feedback. This work in progress tests negative (“aversive”) feedback: Facebook posts about songs and the statement that they were using lots of energy in a pilot with five participants. The participants seemed to respond okay to the posts — which are, in my opinion, pretty mild and not all that negative — and often commented on them. The authors interpret this as aversive feedback not leading to disengagement, but I think that’s a bit too strong of a claim to make on this data: participants, despite being unpaid but having been recruited to the study, likely felt some obligation to follow through to its end in a way that they would not for a commercially or publicly available system, and, with that feeling, may have commented out of a need to publicly explain or justify their usage as shown in the posts. The last point isn’t particularly problematic, as such reflection may be useful. Still, this WiP and the existence of tools like Blackmail Yourself (which *really* hits at the shame element) do suggest that there is more work needed on the efficacy of public, aversive feedback.

• Descriptive analysis of physical activity conversations on Twitter
  Logan Kendall, Andrea Civan Hartzler, Predrag Klasnja, Wanda Pratt

  In my work, I’ve heard a lot of concern about posting health related status updates and about seeing similar status updates from others, but I haven’t taken a detailed look at the status updates that people are currently making, which this WiP makes a start on for physical activity posts on Twitter.By analyzing the results of queries for “weight lifting”, “Pilates”, and “elliptical”, the authors find posts that show evidence of exercise, plans for exercise, attitudes about exercise, requests for help, and advertisements. As the authors note, the limited search terms probably lead to a lot of selection bias, and I’d like to see more information about posts coming from automated sources (e.g., FitBit), as well as how people reply to the different genres of fitness tweets.

• HappinessCounter: smile-encouraging appliance to increase positive mood
  Hitomi Tsujita, Jun Rekimoto

  Fun yet concerning alt.chi work on pushing people to smile in order to increase positive mood. With features such as requiring a smile to open the refrigerator, positive feedback (lights, music) in exchange for smiles, automatic sharing of photos of facial expressions with friends or family members, automatic posting of whether or not someone is smiling enough, this paper hits many of the points about which the Fit4life authors raise concerns.

The panel I co-organized with Margaret E. Morris and Sunny Consolvo, “Facebook for health: opportunities and challenges for driving behavior change,” and featuring Adam D. I. Kramer, Janice Tsai, and Aaron Coleman, went pretty well. It was good to hear what everyone, both familiar and new faces, is up to and working on these days. Thanks to my fellow panelists and everyone who showed up!

There was a lot of interesting work — I came home with 41 papers in my “to read” folder — so I’m sure that I’m missing some great work in the above list. If I’m missing something you think I should be reading, let me know!

This prompted some reactions from the SI folks, some of which got posted to Twitter, e.g., “shouldn’t a concept have a compelling use- or who would use it, and why?” and “there was an arch guy who was shocked by the idea of considering users.” I can understand these reactions, but as someone with less skin in the game (no project to pitch), I think I had a more moderated reaction. After reflecting a bit, I want to write down some thoughts about this difference and start a discussion.

The difference that I saw in the presentations was that the “pitches” showed use cases with no downsides, or only technical obstacles. The “live with” presentations showed a vision that was more rounded and showed pros as well as some very serious cons, particularly for people who would be affected by but may not choose to use the system. In comparison to the “live with” presentations, the pitches seemed a bit naïve or even dishonest, while the “live with” presentations felt incomplete: given such obvious problems, why not change the idea?

So, where does this difference come from? Of course architects consider the people who will be affected by their creations — and not just the “users” — so it’s not that. And of course things should have a compelling use. Something that has a compelling use for some people, though, may still create a less than pleasant experience for others who it affects. This is particularly true for architecture projects — everyone in a neighborhood has to live with a building, not just its occupants — so I can see how that would lead to a certain style of presentation or discussion of a proposal. This is not, however, unique to buildings; groupware and social software certainly affect people who may not opt in, and some persuasive technology is designed specifically to influence people who do not opt in, and so maybe it would be good for some HCI presentations to take a bit more of a humble tone that acknowledges potential downsides.

On the other hand, it’s also often fairly easy to prototype and even do large-scale test deployments of software (i.e., try living with) in a way that simply isn’t possible with large buildings or urban development projects. These prototypes and field tests often let designers learn many of the unintended consequences. (Of course, you only learn about the group you test the app with.)

This assuredness of early feedback on software products, as well as the ability to iterate rapidly after deployment to correct for problems or take advantage of newfound opportunities, makes many software presentations more about why something is worth starting this process of building, releasing, and refining, rather than a discussion about building and living with fairly immutable and durable creation, and I think that motivates a lot of the difference in styles. I’m not completely sure that software designers can continue with this attitude as software becomes more social and hooking up system A to system B can lead to information disclosures with long lasting effects.

Other thoughts?