After reflecting on the research program, one aspect to consider is whether the way that this approach was carried out really aligns with its feminist and phenomenological commitments as it relies on the designers making assumptions about users. Imagining what experience a particular design decision will produce for an imagined user is integral to the interaction design process (Hallnäs & Redström, 2002). One aspect I now reflect on is the fact that the approach of designing for embodied subjectivity asks the designer to make more, rather than fewer, assumptions about the user. Cartesian dualist
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designs of a self-tracking devices prioritise providing accurate truths about the body to the user in effective and efficient ways. The approach to designing for embodied subjectivity takes in the whole inner and outer life world of the user as shaping subjectivity, giving a vastly expanded design space for the designer to work within. In the design process, this was represented through considering the physical and social context that the device would be used within, as well as how knowledge drawn from lived experience of the body influenced the experience of data. This was one of the challenging factors of the application of the theory of embodied subjectivity in our design processes; we could not determine where the boundaries of our responsibility as designers lay. Since all aspects; social contexts, objects, spaces, power structures and morphologies, anatomies, and physiologies, were acknowledged as shaping the subjectivity of the self-tracker, we felt paralysed by the expanse of factors that the experience of our designs would be contingent on.
In order to ensure that we were not making Cartesian dualist assumptions about our imagined users, we stuck to our feminist and phenomenological commitments and used our own emotional sensitivities. If I see this approach as a contribution that could be adopted by other researchers, it then means that this research program, as it currently stands, places the responsibility to produce designs that lived up to feminist and phenomenological commitments solely on the head of the designer. This seemed troubling as it appears to be an approach that relies on the designer having adequate theoretical background knowledge on what is and is not feminist and phenomenological. This was one aspect I wondered about throughout the research program; what could lighten the
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weight of responsibility on the designer to make the right kinds of assumptions in the design process?
As one quality of feminist HCI, pluralising research methods through employing participants in the design process seemed to be one way to negate the responsibility of designing devices that live up to feminist goals being solely with the designer (S. Bardzell & Bardzell, 2011). Co-design and participatory design methods provides a wider range of standpoints and pluralized voices and discussants to explore design possibilities and the implications of design decisions (S. Bardzell, 2018; Ehn, Nilsson, & Topgaard, 2014). One way in which I felt that this research program could be re-configured and expanded is through using the experience of participants from the very beginning of the design process. This would provide actual, rather than imaginary, scenarios that technological devices are used within. The ongoing collaborative ‘Gut Feeling’ project, which was initiated early in 2019 and involves other members of the IxD Lab at ITU, explores using participatory methods in the design of self-tracking technologies. The project is based on my proposal for exploring how new knowledge about how gut health influences mental health might be reflected in the design of self-tracking devices.
This project firstly involved our design team of seven people carrying out autoethnographies with lo-fi cardboard devices fitted with ethanol sensors that provided a number score for the ethanol present on our breathe. Our task during the two-week long study was to measure our breath twice a day and reflect on how the number given by the device could relate to our mental health and document our reflections in journals. Some suspension of our disbelief was required since we knew that
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readings of ethanol levels do not directly link to gut health. This was a speculative exercise to understand how we might design for new scientific knowledge about the body.
This exercise led to us understanding that our relationships with our bodies are completely idiosyncratic, and how use of self-tracking technologies is motivated by a wide range of aims and desires. Some of our group wanted embodied interactions with their data in order to enhance their sense of self, and others wanted total objectivity and distance from their data; for the process to take place seamlessly in their lives with them only benefiting through improving their health. In order to gain a more expert perspective on the topic of the emerging scientific knowledge on the mind/gut connection, we collaborated with members of the ‘Microbes on the Mind’ project at the Medical Museion in Copenhagen. These were a mixed group of academics with backgrounds in philosophy, sociology, and public health from Copenhagen University as well as project leaders from the Medical Musieon. We held an initial meeting and asked this group to complete the same autoethnographic study with the lo-fi prototypes. We then used their experiences and reactions to the cardboard box breathalysers to sketch prototypes that better fit each member’s experience of their bodies and understandings of how their gut health interacts with their mental health. Formalizing these designs into interactive prototypes is still in process, and we will return to the members of the ‘Microbes on the Mind’ research group again with our finished prototypes in the coming months to gather their reactions.
Over the last year, ‘Gut Feeling’ has been a parallel project that has helped me reflect on the differences between designing
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from the lived experience of the users outwards, as we have done with the ‘Gut Feeling’ project, and designing a prototype with certain theoretical commitments and then seeing what this prototype does in the lives of users, as evident in the studies of the deployments of the prototypes Ovum and Ambient Cycle. There is an expectation that pluralising the design process through involving marginalised voices will produce more democratic design processes and will produce designs that better serve a wider range of users (S. Bardzell, 2018; Ehn et al., 2014). The findings from the ‘Gut Feeling’ project were that this was an agonistic exercise (Bjögvinsson, Ehn, & Hillgren, 2012; Disalvo, 2010). The experience of the body is completely subjective, and self-tracking is a very idiosyncratic process taking place in many different contexts and environments with completely contrasting desires and aims. This means that inevitably, each self-tracker would require their own design of self-tracking device to create truly intersectional designs. Once subjectivity is understood as being shaped by a whole range of factors, and not just scientific facts about the physiological state of the body, then how can one person’s subjectivity be likened to another? This raises the question: how intersectional can designs of self-tracking technologies really be? Though one answer may be in creating designs that are open enough to be used in a range of contexts, this would risk a universalising approach by once again categorising users by one aspect of their biological body; something that this approach has worked hard to avoid. One possibility is that there is a chance that trends and themes may arise between potential users; perhaps there are there commonalities between self-trackers that were not shown within our Gut Feeling project as the sample group was too small.
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Expanding this research program through the ‘Gut Feeling’ project has allowed me to explore how participatory methods could lessen the weight of responsibility on the designer in making the right kinds of assumptions about users, i.e. those informed by feminism and phenomenological perspectives. This has led me to understand that participatory methods are useful in producing knowledge on actual contexts that self-tracking takes place within, attitudes towards self-tracking, and the diverse subjective experiences of the body, but that these methods are not generative in producing designs that can fit into multiple users’ existing contexts and desires for self- tracking. Further work developing this research program will include exploring how to negotiate the spectrum between designing universalising devices and designing idiosyncratic self-tracking devices that only work for one individual. This represents a shift in the research program towards aiming to produce devices that users might find desirable and useful. This has not been the aim of this research program since I did not adopt a specifically user-centred approach, but rather a more open exploration of the implications of designing self-tracking technologies with non-Cartesian ethical, epistemological and ontological commitments.