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MEMEories: Internet Memes as Means for Daily Journaling

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... The daily practice of journaling and the narration of personal experiences, thoughts, and emotions is a human activity that has been around for a long while [1]. Benefits of journaling as a reflective practice include the discovery of meaning, gaining perspective about others, developing critical thinking and affective skills, among others [2]. ...
... Food journaling is another area of interest for Interaction Design research, where journaling as a tool for self-reflection helps support healthy eating behaviors [9]. Internet Memes have been researched as an alternative way of journaling that has shown positive effects on helping participants process emotional experiences [1]. Computer-supported reflective learning in a workplace context is another research area within HCI, where journaling is aimed at using reflection as a tool for learning [10]. ...
... Journaling is a method of documenting personal experiences by writing down everyday thoughts and emotions as well as connecting various bits of information [1,2,15] to gain insight, reflect and track personal growth [5]. Journaling can support learning, personal growth, and professional development [4]. ...
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Designing for reflection and journaling have been a prominent research areas in HCI and Interaction Design. However, designing for the experience of journaling that is supported by conversations with AI-Conversational Agent (CA)-to foster reflection seems to be a relatively unexplored area. Furthermore, while there are an abundant number of general guidelines and design principles for designing human-AI interactions, a set of guidelines for designing an interactive and reflective journaling experience with AI is lacking. This paper is a first attempt to address that need. We present the result of a qualitative user study on interactive and reflective journaling. We were interested in attending to our participants' experiences and finding out their needs regarding the interactive journaling experience with CA. The user needs then were translated to design requirements and thereafter to themes or design principles. Some of our findings suggest that one of the important factors in journaling is the personal aesthetics of writing, by using carefully selected personal tools, specific materiality and interactions. Further, the flow of writing is considered sacred, hence it is almost like an untouchable, reflective ritualistic flow. Reflecting on the findings, we believe the outcome of this study can create opportunities for designing for human-AI interactions that are generative and reflective for activities that require such qualities, such as journaling or creativity.
... Reflection is influenced by both internal and individual activity, and external and collective components, e.g., relationships to artifacts, activities, places, and people [15]. Reflective journaling is an activity where a human documents their personal experiences by writing down and connecting thoughts and emotions with the goal of reflection and personal growth [1,16,17]. Journaling as a reflection method enables persons to organize, clarify, and connect knowledge in a concrete form, allowing them to process old and new knowledge [4]. Furthermore, the journal writer actively engages in a learning process [1] as they create meaning and context from their experiences [18]. ...
... In HCI and Interaction Design, journaling has been explored in different areas and applications. For instance, MEMEory is a mobile journaling application that uses memes as a medium for reflecting [17], and Eat4Thought is a food journaling application to identify eating behaviors [20]. Another study used blogging as a computer-mediated journaling tool in a classroom environment to encourage discussions and reflections [18]. ...
Chapter
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Designing for reflection and journaling have been prominent research areas in HCI and Interaction Design. However, designing for the experience of journaling that is supported by conversations with AI–Conversational Agent (CA)–to foster reflection seems to be a relatively unexplored area. Furthermore, while there are an abundant number of general guidelines and design principles for designing human-AI interactions, a set of guidelines for designing an interactive and reflective journaling experience with AI is lacking. This paper is a first attempt to address that need. We present the result of a qualitative user study on interactive and reflective journaling. We were interested in attending to our participants’ experiences and finding out their needs regarding the interactive journaling experience with CA. The user needs then were translated to design requirements and thereafter to themes or design principles. Some of our findings suggest that one of the important factors in journaling is the personal aesthetics of writing, by using carefully selected personal tools, specific materiality and interactions. Further, the flow of writing is considered sacred, hence it is almost like an untouchable, reflective ritualistic flow. Reflecting on the findings, we believe the outcome of this study can create opportunities for designing for human-AI interactions that are generative and reflective for activities that require such qualities, such as journaling or creativity.KeywordsJournalingReflectionInteraction DesignHuman-AI InteractionConversational Design
... A discussion session was later held among authors to review each paper and design approach we surveyed. We concurred to filter out approaches that are: I) too individualised and arbitrary for a visual storytelling system (e.g., pictorial runes in comics [31]), II) too demanding that might seem distracting for storytelling (e.g., emoji or meme creation [29,86]), and III) not creative or open-ended enough for the purpose of self-expression and self-reflection (e.g., colours, shapes, filters, style transfer, etc). ...
... This approach of recruiting a portion of the participants to contribute additional qualitative information has been used by prior work in HCI (c.f. [14,21,33,77]). However, all questions were marked as optional. ...
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Smartphone overuse is hyper-prevalent in society, and developing tools to prevent this overuse has become a focus of HCI. However, there is a lack of work investigating smartphone overuse interventions over the long term. We collected usage data from 𝑁 = 1, 039 users of one sec over an average of 13.4 weeks and qualitative insights from 249 of the users through an online survey. We found that users overwhelmingly choose to target Social Media apps. We found that the short design frictions introduced by one sec effectively reduce how often users attempt to open target apps and lead to more intentional app-openings over time. Additionally, we found that users take periodic breaks from one sec interventions, and quickly rebound from a pattern of overuse when returning from breaks. Overall, we contribute findings from a longitudinal investigation of design frictions in the wild and identify usage patterns from real users in practice.
... It is progress in this area (and others like it) that implementations of health or fitness trackers have experienced a wider acceptance. HCI has indeed gone to some lengths to understand analogue practices (Tholander & Normark, 2020) or investigate ways of modernising them (Terzimehić et al., 2021). Nevertheless, we believe we could extend current understanding by examining analogue, digital, and hybrid approaches. ...
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Although self-reflection is a topic that appears in Human-Computer Interaction, the empirical data on the subject can often be dated, fragmented and focused on particular use cases. Our work sought to capture data that would help us better understand the current use of technologies to support self-reflection in the broader population. We did this through a large-scale online survey with a representative sample of internet users in the United Kingdom (N = 998) and a smaller series of follow-up interviews (N = 20). We found that, regardless of recent stress, those with high scores on a scale that measured self-reflection maintained a wider variety of self-reflective activities in recent months. Men reported more access and use of technology for self-reflective activity than women, but women's self-reflection scores were usually higher. We noted that high self-reflectors appear more spontaneous and experimental, using heuristics to mitigate common barriers or adapt their practice to stressors. These individuals appear to favour analogue objects to facilitate reflective practice, utilising technology in more strategic and selective ways.
... Concurrently, a stream of research focusing on everyday life reflection is also emerged [40,41,43]. The literature is now exploring ways to visually support reflection on everyday life in novel ways, such as using memes [50] or user-generated visual compositions [27]. ...
... Here, garments are designed to become memes, that invite for copying and imitation and are not perceived as an "original". While HCI scholars have recently explored memes as a design material [64], they have to date not been discussed as a concept for the design of technology in collocated social interactions. ...
... Here, garments are designed to become memes, that invite for copying and imitation and are not perceived as an "original". While HCI scholars have recently explored memes as a design material [62], they have to date not been discussed as a concept for the design of technology in collocated social interactions. These attributes reveal memes as a tool for involvement and for expressing membership to ever smaller groups and building community within them. ...
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Social wearables promise to augment and enhance social interactions. However, despite two decades of HCI research on wearables, we are yet to see widespread adoption of social wearables into everyday life. More in-situ investigations into the social dynamics and cultural practices afforded by wearing interactive technology are needed to understand the drivers and barriers to adoption. To this end, we study social wearables in the context of Nordic student culture and the students' practice of adorning boiler suits. Through a co-creation process, we designed Digi Merkki, a personalised interactive clothing patch. In a two-week elicitation diary study, we captured how 16 students adopted Digi Merkki into their social practices. We found that Digi Merkki afforded a variety of social interaction strategies, including sharing, spamming, and stealing pictures, which supported meaning-making and community-building. Based on our findings, we articulate Memetic Expression as a strong concept for designing social wearables.
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Reflecting on everyday experiences offers valuable insights and has the potential to enhance psychological well-being. Yet, only some have access to a facilitator for reflection. Conversational agents hold promise as companions for these discussions. We surveyed individuals with therapy experience to understand user needs and arrived at interaction strategies used in therapy. We then evaluated these strategies with five therapists and transformed our data, along with their input, into a set of interaction strategies to be used on conversational agents for reflection. We developed an AI chatbot prototype where we implemented these strategies and conducted a 1-week in-the-wild study with 34 participants to evaluate the interaction strategies and experiences of interacting with a chatbot for reflection. Findings reveal that participants are willing to engage with a chatbot, even with limited capabilities. Critical aspects include the chatbot’s contextual awareness, statement repetition, and human-like qualities. Successfully balancing questions with non-question statements is essential for a pleasurable dialogue-driven reflection. Our paper presents implications for future design and research studies.
Chapter
Conversational Agents (CAs) are making human-computer interaction more collaborative and conversational through using natural language. The HCI and interaction design communities, have been experimenting with and exploring the area of designing conversational interactions. Furthermore, interaction designers may need to acquire new skills for designing, prototyping, and evaluating artifacts that embody AI technologies in general, and CAs in particular. This paper builds upon a previous study on principles of designing interactive journaling experiences with CA and explores the practice of designing such experiences, using words, language, and conversations as design materials. We present a prototype for interactive and reflective journaling interaction with CA and the result of a Wizard of Oz experiment. Our findings suggest that designing interactions with CA challenges designers to use materials with inherently different natures and qualities. Despite this challenge, words appear to have unique characteristics to support designers to externalize and iterate on ideas, e.g., tone and intent. Hence, we suggest considering words, language, and conversations as the primary design materials, and the AI’s predictability, adaptivity, and agency as secondary materials, while designing human interactions with Conversational Agents.
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Self-tracking physiological and psychological data poses the challenge of presentation and interpretation. Insightful narratives for self-tracking data can motivate the user towards constructive self-reflection. One powerful form of narrative that engages audience across various culture and age groups is animated movies. We collected a week of self-reported mood and behavior data from each user and created in Unity a personalized animation based on their data. We evaluated the impact of their video in a randomized control trial with a non-personalized animated video as control. We found that personalized videos tend to be more emotionally engaging, encouraging greater and lengthier writing that indicated self-reflection about moods and behaviors, compared to non-personalized control videos.
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This study proposes a theoretical framework for understanding how and why certain memes prevail as a form of political discourse online. Since memes are constantly changing as they spread, drawing inferences from a population of memes as concrete digital artifacts is a pressing challenge for researchers. This article argues that meme selection and mutation are driven by a cooperative combination of three types of communication logic: wasteful play online, social media political expression, and cultural evolution. To illustrate this concept, we map Shepard Fairey’s Obama Hope Poster as it spreads online. Employing structural rhetorical analysis, the study categorizes Internet memes on branching diagrams as they evolve. We argue that mapping these variations is a useful tool for organizing memes as an expression of the values and preferences embedded in online communities. The study adds to the growing literature around the subversive nature of memetic diffusion in popular and political culture.
Conference Paper
In this paper we describe a Research through Design inquiry about a speculative wedding documentation service, in the mode of the Quantified Self. We reflect on our design research, which included design ethnography, interviews, enactments of parts of the service, and the production of a concept brochure. In so doing, we explore the design of personal tracking as a documentary activity, one intended for longer-term self-expression and remembering -- rather than simply to monitor, regulate and motivate a data-driven life. Developing the Lived Informatics discourse, we use our design-led inquiry to propose "Documentary Informatics" as an alternative and longer-term design perspective on self-tracking tools.
Conference Paper
Consumer health technologies have an enormous potential to transform the self-management of chronic conditions. However, it is unclear how individuals use self-tracking technologies to manage them. This in-depth interview study explores self-tracking practices in multiple sclerosis (MS), a complex neurological disease that causes physical, cognitive, and psychological symptoms. Our findings illustrate that when faced the unpredictable and degenerative nature of MS, individuals regained a sense of control by intertwining self-care practices with different self-tracking technologies. They engaged in disease monitoring, fitness tracking, and life journaling to quantify the body and care for the mind. We focus attention on the role of emotional wellbeing and the experience of control in self-tracking and managing MS. Finally, we discuss in which ways self-tracking technologies could support the experiential nature of control and foster mindful experiences rather than focusing only on tracking primary disease indicators.
Article
The paper explores memes, digital artefacts that acquire a viral character and become globally popular, as an aesthetic trend that not only entices but propels and molds subjective, collective and political becoming. Following both Simondon and Bakhtin, memes are first considered as aesthetic objects that mediate individuation. Here, resonance between psychic, collective and technical individuation is established and re-enacted through the aesthetic consummation of self, the collective and the technical in the various performances of meme cultures. Secondly, if memes are followed in the making, from birth to their spill-over onto wider social networks, the very expressive form of meme turns out to be borne by specific technical architecture and mannerisms of a small number of platforms, and, most notably, the image board 4chan. The source of memes’ various forms of power is concentrated here. Memes are intimately linked to 4chan’s /b/ board, the birthplace of Lulzsec and the Anonymous hacking networks. Memes’ architectonics, as an inheritance of a few specific human-technical structures, in turn informs the production of new platforms (memes generators), forms of networked
Article
We explore the Examined Life, informing the design of reflective systems to promote emotional well-being, a critical health issue. People now have increasingly rich, digital records of highly personal data about what they said, did and felt in the past. But social science research shows that people have difficulty in tracking and regulating their emotions. New reflective technologies that promote constructive analysis of rich personal data potentially offer transformative ways that individuals might better understand themselves and improve well-being. However, there are important system design challenges in supporting effective reflection about personal data. We explore fidelity in recording and representing past personal mood data, and forecasting future actions, feelings and thoughts. Much prior personal informatics work has been dedicated to past-centric tools for recording and capture. In contrast, forecasting examines how we might use such past data to inform and motivate our future selves, providing recommendations about remedial actions to improve future well-being. Fidelity addresses both how and what reflective systems should show people about their pasts, in particular whether we should filter negative past experiences. To inform reflective system design, we examine forecasting and fidelity in controlled field trial interventions that explore two novel system designs for presenting and reflecting on mood data. We detail findings from 165 participants, 4,693 participant logfiles, 65 surveys and 15 user interviews. Our novel forecasting system, EmotiCal, uses past mood data to model and visualize future user moods with the goal of encouraging participants to adopt remedial new behaviors to regulate negative moods before they occur. Such forecasting both improved mood and subsequent emotional self-awareness compared with controls who simply monitored their past. Consistent with system goals, interview responses also indicated that participants generated important insights into behaviors that affect their moods. Our second intervention examined filtering; it assessed the impact on well-being of recording and revisiting past experiences containing negative emotions. We compared participants who were encouraged to record and reflect on positive versus negative experiences. Long-term measures of happiness and ruminative behaviors improved by recording and reflecting on positive, but not negative experiences, although this depended on the intensity of the negative experience. We discuss general design and theory implications for future systems that support monitoring, reflection and forecasting to facilitate productive examination of our emotional lives.
Conference Paper
Smart journals are both an emerging class of lifelogging applications and novel digital possessions, which are used to create and curate a personal record of one's life. Through an in-depth interview study of analogue and digital journaling practices, and by drawing on a wide range of research around --technologies of memory?, we address fundamental questions about how people manage and value digital records of the past. Appreciating journaling as deeply idiographic, we map a broad range of user practices and motivations and use this understanding to ground four design considerations: recognizing the motivation to account for one's life; supporting the authoring of a unique perspective and finding a place for passive tracking as a chronicle. Finally, we argue that smart journals signal a maturing orientation to issues of digital archiving.
Conference Paper
Despite demonstrated interest in designing for reflection, relatively little work provides a detailed explication of what exactly is meant by reflection or how to design around it. This paper fills that gap by reviewing and engaging with conceptual and theoretical models of reflection, organized by the disciplinary and epistemological perspectives each embodies. Synthesizing across this theoretical background, the paper identifies three dimensions of reflection: breakdown, inquiry, and transformation. Together, these dimensions serve as the foundation for reflective informatics, a conceptual approach that helps bring clarity and guidance to the discussion of designing for reflection. The paper distinguishes reflective informatics by demonstrating how it both differs from and complements existing related work. Finally, the paper provides a critically reflexive consideration of its own latent assumptions, especially about the value of reflection, and how they might impact work on designing for reflection.
Book
From Thomas Hobbes' fear of the power of laughter to the compulsory, packaged "fun" of the contemporary mass media, Billig takes the reader on a stimulating tour of the strange world of humour. Both a significant work of scholarship and a novel contribution to the understanding of the humourous, this is a seriously engaging book' - David Inglis, University of Aberdeen This delightful book tackles the prevailing assumption that laughter and humour are inherently good. In developing a critique of humour the author proposes a social theory that places humour - in the form of ridicule - as central to social life. Billig argues that all cultures use ridicule as a disciplinary means to uphold norms of conduct and conventions of meaning. Historically, theories of humour reflect wider visions of politics, morality and aesthetics. For example, Bergson argued that humour contains an element of cruelty while Freud suggested that we deceive ourselves about the true nature of our laughter. Billig discusses these and other theories, while using the topic of humour to throw light on the perennial social problems of regulation, control and emancipation.
Conference Paper
User experience (UX) research has expanded our notion of what makes interactive technology good, often putting hedonic aspects of use such as fun, affect, and stimulation at the center. Outside of UX, the hedonic is often contrasted to the eudaimonic, the notion of striving towards one's personal best. It remains unclear, however, what this distinction offers to UX research conceptually and empirically. We investigate a possible role for eudaimonia in UX research by empirically examining 266 reports of positive experiences with technology and analyzing its relation to established UX concepts. Compared to hedonic experiences, eudaimonic experiences were about striving towards and accomplishing personal goals through technology use. They were also characterized by increased need fulfillment, positive affect, meaning, and long-term importance. Taken together, our findings suggest that while hedonic UX is about momentary pleasures directly derived from technology use, eudaimonic UX is about meaning from need fulfilment.
Article
This paper presents a broad overview of the expressive writing paradigm. Since its first use in the 1980s, dozens of studies have explored the parameters and boundary conditions of its effectiveness. In the laboratory, consistent and significant health improvements are found when individuals write or talk about personally upsetting experiences. The effects include both subjective and objective markers of health and well-being. The disclosure phenomenon appears to generalize across settings, many individual difference factors, and several Western cultures, and is independent of social feedback.
Conference Paper
Current models of how people use personal informatics systems are largely based in behavior change goals. They do not adequately characterize the integration of self-tracking into everyday life by people with varying goals. We build upon prior work by embracing the perspective of lived informatics to propose a new model of personal informatics. We examine how lived informatics manifests in the habits of self-trackers across a variety of domains, first by surveying 105, 99, and 83 past and present trackers of physical activity, finances, and location and then by interviewing 22 trackers regarding their lived informatics experiences. We develop a model characterizing tracker processes of deciding to track and selecting a tool, elaborate on tool usage during collection, integration, and reflection as components of tracking and acting, and discuss the lapsing and potential resuming of tracking. We use our model to surface underexplored challenges in lived informatics, thus identifying future directions for personal informatics design and research.
Article
This article probes the cultural meaning of contemporary meme genres that are based on photographs. The analysis looks into the broad dimensions of truth and temporality, as expressed in three prominent genres: reaction Photoshops, stock character macros, and photo fads. Based on patterns shared by these genres, it is argued that photo-based memes function as both modes of hypersignification, wherein the code itself becomes the focus of attention, and as prospective photography, wherein photos are increasingly perceived as the raw material for future images. Finally, combining the two frames, memes are conceptualized as operative signs – textual categories that are designed as invitations for (creative) action. While these three qualities were also evident, in one way or another, in traditional forms of photography, they have emerged as governing logics in an era marked by an amalgamation of digital photography and participatory culture.
Article
Designers have demonstrated an increased interest in designing for reflection. However, that work currently occurs under a variety of diverse auspices. To help organize and investigate this literature, this paper present a review of research on systems designed to support reflection. Key findings include that most work in this area does not actually define the concept of reflection. We also find that most evaluations do not focus on reflection per se rather but on some other outcome arguably linked to reflection. Our review also describes the relationship between reflection and persuasion evidenced implicitly by both rhetorical motivations for and implementation details of system design. After discussing the significance of our findings, we conclude with a series of recommendations for improving research on and design for reflection.
Article
This paper characterises the use of activity trackers as 'lived informatics'. This characterisation is contrasted with other discussions of personal informatics and the quantified self. The paper reports an interview study with activity tracker users. The study found: People do not logically organise, but interweave various activity trackers, sometimes with ostensibly the same functionality; that tracking is often social and collaborative rather than personal; that there are different styles of tracking, including goal driven tracking and documentary tracking; and that tracking information is often used and interpreted with reference to daily or short term goals and decision making. We suggest there will be difficulties in personal informatics if we ignore the way that personal tracking is enmeshed with everyday life and people's outlook on their future.
Conference Paper
In the field of mental health care technologies, very limited attention has been given to the design of interventions for individuals who undergo treatment for severe mental health problems in intense care contexts. Exploring novel designs to engage vulnerable psychiatric patients in therapeutic skills practice and expanding on the potential of technology to promote mental health, the paper introduces the design concept of the Spheres of Wellbeing. A set of interactive artifacts is developed specifically for women with a dual diagnosis of a Learning Disability and Borderline Personality Disorder, living in the medium secure services of a forensic hospital in the UK. The women present a difficult to treat group due to extremely challenging behaviors and a fundamental lack of motivation to engage in therapy. The Spheres are designed to assist the women in practices of mindfulness, to help them tolerate emotional distress and to strengthen their sense of self, all of which are vital components of their specialist treatment Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT). The Spheres are intended to supplement the therapy of the women and to contribute to our understanding of designing technology to enhance mental wellbeing and quality of life more generally.
Article
An epidemiological approach is adopted to develop a model of viral meme propagation. The successful implementation in the modelling of meme spread as reflected in Internet search data shows that memes may be treated as infectious entities when modelling their propagation over time and across societies.
Article
The emerging field of emotion regulation studies how individuals influence which emotions they have, when they have them, and how they experience and express them. This review takes an evolutionary perspective and characterizes emotion in terms of response tendencies. Emotion regulation is defined and distinguished from coping, mood regulation, defense, and affect regulation. In the increasingly specialized discipline of psychology, the field of emotion regulation cuts across traditional boundaries and provides common ground. According to a process model of emotion regulation, emotion may be regulated at five points in the emotion generative process: (a) selection of the situation, (b) modification of the situation, (c) deployment of attention, (d) change of cognitions, and (e) modulation of responses. The field of emotion regulation promises new insights into age-old questions about how people manage their emotions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved)
Article
1. Ecological count data (e.g. number of individuals or species) are often log-transformed to satisfy parametric test assumptions. 2. Apart from the fact that generalized linear models are better suited in dealing with count data, a log-transformation of counts has the additional quandary in how to deal with zero observations. With just one zero observation (if this observation represents a sampling unit), the whole data set needs to be fudged by adding a value (usually 1) before transformation. 3. Simulating data from a negative binomial distribution, we compared the outcome of fitting models that were transformed in various ways (log, square root) with results from fitting models using quasi-Poisson and negative binomial models to untransformed count data. 4. We found that the transformations performed poorly, except when the dispersion was small and the mean counts were large. The quasi-Poisson and negative binomial models consistently performed well, with little bias. 5. We recommend that count data should not be analysed by log-transforming it, but instead models based on Poisson and negative binomial distributions should be used.