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As a technologist and designer, I'm interested in the overlap between personal informatics and modern subjectivity: in the stories we tell through, and because of, our devices-as-companions. Personal informatics allows us to understand information about ourselves but the path is not always a straightforward one where more knowledge leads to more insight. The process of acquiring that knowledge, and the personal transformations that come along with it, often combine to yield surprising insights. I performed a year-long auto-ethnographic project of weight-loss and self-transformation through personal informatics and I use that experience here to make two arguments: for more embodied and autoethnographic evaluations, and for expanding both design and evaluation criteria to include the rich and contradictory relationships with ourselves and our world that the use of personal informatics can generate.

Created by Ian Li. HCII, Carnegie Mellon University.