The Social Journal: Investigating Technology to Support and Reflect on Meaningful Social Interactions

MCML Authors

Albrecht Schmidt

Prof. Dr.

Principal Investigator

Human-Centered Ubiquitous Media

Luke Haliburton

Dr.

* Former Member

→ Group Albrecht Schmidt
 Human-Centered Ubiquitous Media

Abstract

Social interaction is a crucial part of what it means to be human. Maintaining a healthy social life is strongly tied to positive outcomes for both physical and mental health. While we use personal informatics data to reflect on many aspects of our lives, technology-supported reflection for social interactions is currently under-explored. To address this, we first conducted an online survey (N=124) to understand how users want to be supported in their social interactions. Based on this, we designed and developed an app for users to track and reflect on their social interactions and deployed it in the wild for two weeks (N=25). Our results show that users are interested in tracking meaningful in-person interactions that are currently untraced and that an app can effectively support self-reflection on social interaction frequency and social load. We contribute insights and concrete design recommendations for technology-supported reflection for social interaction.

inproceedings

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CHI 2024

Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Honolulu, Hawaii, May 11-16, 2024.

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Authors

S. Sakel • T. Blenk • A. Schmidt • L. Haliburton

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Links

DOI

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Research Area

 C5 | Humane AI