Designing for Awareness

An emerging field of interaction design related to personal health.

Interaction designers talk a lot about a user’s emotional experience, but they understand very little about what motivates people to engage. How can designers understand triggers (signals, facilitators, and sparks) that help to change people’s behavior? frog VP of Creative Robert Fabricant investigates.

“Understanding is important but it’s only the beginning. It’s got to lead to change in a meaningful way.” Tom Igoe

At this year’s SXSW Interactive conference, VP of Creative Robert Fabricant presented "Design for Awareness: Mobile Technologies & Health." Robert spoke about mobile technologies and sensors that have the potential to heighten our awareness of our own behavior in meaningful ways. We caught up with Robert to talk about how these issues have opened up new opportunities and challenges for interaction designers. You can use the short video as a narrative as you click through the slides from his presentation, below.

*Augmented Mindfulness is a term coined by frog Principal Designer Josh Musick, defining a  growing field of user experience design that applies to methods of recording behavior, processing the data collected, and feeding it back to the individual or group so that they can better understand the patterns of their activity; and, ostensibly, adapt their behavior more intelligently than they would without these augmentations.