Accepted Papers |
Call for Participation
Take a stance! Designing for healthy consumption
Christian A. Detweiler, Alina Huldtgren, Nick Guldemond
Personal informatics apps that promote healthy consumption share similar aims, but vary in the means they adopt to meet them. The adopted means reflect different stances. Stances are the positions that designers implicitly take on a range of issues, such as personal information, freedom of choice and responsibility. Judgments on values such as privacy, autonomy and accountability underlie these stances. We argue for the use of stances as a tool to design personal informatics apps for healthy consumption. Making stances explicit and exploring alternate stances can help designers and stakeholders analyze means and their consequences, and identify and explore alternative approaches. This can better align app’s approaches with users' values, improving ethical acceptability, adoption and long-term use. We examine a number of apps, identify the implicit stances they take, and propose next steps toward using stances as a design tool.