Exploring how a simple situated ambient logger can support goal awareness and monitoring

Abstract

This thesis explores the design and evaluation of a Simple, Situated, Sisyphean, Ambient Logger (SAL) to support goal awareness and monitoring of people's goals. All of us have activities and tasks that we want to do every day, to achieve our long-term goals, related to important aspects of our lives, such as health, diet, education and etc. We describe such tasks - that need to be done each day - as Sisyphean tasks. They include things like drinking enough water, eating enough vegetables, doing regular stretches through the day, putting on sunscreen. This thesis explores how to create a device to support such Sisyphean tasks, by designing a device we call a SAL logger, with the following core elements: this makes it very simple for a person to both log completed Sisyphean tasks and to easily see daily progress on them; it is situated, meaning it is located in the right place for the user to encounter its ambient display, which helps them remember the tasks and see the progress on them. This thesis first presents a conceptual model for SAL loggers, followed by a systematic review of the literature to find studies of ambient displays for personal data. Then, it presents the design and implementation of an infrastructure and user interface for SAL loggers. The remainder of the thesis is a series of three studies in the iterative design refinement of the interface. These explored how people use such systems and the impact of having a situated logger for their goal awareness, progress, monitoring and achievements. The final study, with the final version of SAL, with participants guided in selecting a set of their own goals, and associated targets, provides insights about the ways that people can use SAL loggers for self-awareness and monitoring of their personal Sisyphean task sets.