Since personal informatics tools, such as smartwatch or tracking applications, became easily available in the commercial market, reflection has become an integral practice for cultivating knowledge and catalyzing behavioral change. Personal informatics is primarily designed to capture longitudinal data and support reflection in generating insights for self-improvement and facilitating behavior change. These systems collect a massive amount of individual data on behalf of users and help them easily revisit their previous experience or actions.
Reflection is an indispensable activity for cultivating knowledge and catalyzing behavioral change; it is also a cornerstone of the practices underlying personal informatics. While much research has explored various strategies to stimulate reflection, most reflective practices supported by tracking systems often fail to stimulate critical reflection, which is understood to more effectively transform self-knowledge into new behavior and the consideration of wider implications to make a conscious decision
In this project, we aim to explore how we can design technologies, including personal informatics, to foster critical reflection, a way of noticing different things and exploring other ways of seeing about experiences and everyday lives.