Self-reflection By Numbers

The July 09 U.S. edition of Wired magazine has an interesting set of articles dealing with what happens once the body goes electric and becomes a beaming node on The Network, pulsating bits with its every heartbeat:

"And not only can we collect that data, we can analyze it as well, looking for patterns, information that might help us change both the quality and the length of our lives. We can live longer and better by applying, on a personal scale, the same quantitative mindset that powers Google and medical research. Call it Living by Numbers, the ability to gather and analyze data about yourself, setting up a feedback loop that we can use to upgrade our lives, from better health to better habits to better performance."

As you might know I've long been fascinated by the evolution of many Connectedland products and services into "tools of self-reflection" (brighter minds have talked about "self-knowledge through numbers", but the idea is the same). We are typically moved to profound reflection by the odd black swan event affecting us, whether good or bad: falling in love, the birth of a baby, the death of a loved one, a brush with disaster. Similar events can often turn out to be life-changing experiences, and we write books about them to make sure others can benefit from our sudden enlightenment.

Of course that seldom happens. Why? Because on the other hand we typically suck at detecting the subtle patterns in our lives, the meaning hidden deep under layers of ordinary, often repetitive activities that constitute the thin scaffolding holding up our daily stroll through time.

As we have all experienced at one point or another it's very hard to decide to change one's habits based on - well - awareness about those very habits, simply because we often put attention on mute when it comes to them, and we let muscle memory and cognitive autopilot take care of things, while our mind drifts away into its own self-generated stream of un-consciousness. In other words we don't notice what needs changing, simply because we don't even know it's taking place, or we have a misguided sense of what we do and how we do it and how often, so unfocused awareness gets lost in the realm of the possible and uncertain, and we're left with a numb finger to pull the trigger of decision and action.That's why many self-help courses start with keeping a diary, the archetypal pre-digital tool of self-reflection.

What has changed in recent times is that we have built digital devices that hold forever and never forget the bits we feed them, and the same tools also turn out to be great at enabling us to dig both wide and deep into the data we accrue over time. Such tools help us detect those precious invisible patterns, enabling us to extract meaning and sense by washing away the mnemonic detritus and leaving our behaviors clean in the open for us to observe and reflect upon, individually and collectively. Tools of self-reflection.

The discipline that has raised to answer the call to map the invisible threads connecting our traces is called Information Visualization, and companies like Stamen have been showing the world how data can be made to generate images that often straddle the fine line between informative usefulness and sheer beauty. This emerging area pushing the intersection of graphic and interaction design might also be another angle onto the stimulating debate recently fueled by frog design's own Robert Fabricant on the intentional impact design can or should have on human behavior.

We are increasingly surrounded by tools that can trigger change by enabling and facilitating self-reflection. How to design them poses new challenges, of course.

Make no mistake, trying to distill knowledge and meaning out of raw data through the creation of compelling visual representations is first and foremost an act of interpretation, not to mention an added layer of information in itself of course. From this perspective it does not matter if the end result it's just a simple bar graph showing the progress in your running performance, or a complex multi-nodal representation of your social network as it evolved over time, the chosen graphic expression is - using the term at large - a political decision, just like any other design decision. In other words, it comes with a point of view, that of the designer.

If you think about it even simply deciding to show progress in someone's running performance - positive or negative - ultimately underlies a clear goal: get you to run longer, or faster, or more often. The overt service is to provide you with a tool to track your performance, the less evident intent is to have you reflect upon and change your habits by having an objective reference of your accomplishments over time.

Here's also where interactivity comes into play, and a key role it should indeed play, giving end-users the ability to manipulate the data via its digital graphic representation. It should be the designer's responsibility to shape tools that can give people the ability to change and even contradict the visual point of view offered as the default. Enough. For now.

As a pretty irrelevant personal footnote I have to admit that whenever these topics come around I cannot not recall Cuban Council's Moodstats, early 2000 pixelated graphics and all.  Probably just an experiment intended to test what Shockwave (Shockwave!) could do back then, but still a valuable intuition with the proverbial 20/20 hindsight.