Abstract
The "Quantified Self" movement has grown, with more people using self-tracking tools to monitor everything from physical activities to emotional well-being. This study investigates the interplay between self-tracking practices and positive psychology, highlighting their collective potential to boost personal well-being. Integrating self-tracked data with principles like strengths, resilience, and personal growth allows for the transformation of mere metrics into compelling stories. The paper presents a de-sign framework that is influenced by classroom projects and the examination of data presentation in health and fitness apps. This framework manages the complete data lifecycle—from collection and organization to interpretation, presentation, and finally, harnessing data—with an aim to nurture positive emotions, acknowledge personal significance, and encourage growth. It seeks to merge the self-tracking data process with key tenets of positive psychology, turning raw data into actionable insights that foster positive behaviors and enhance the effective-ness of self-tracking tools in promoting user well-being.
Keywords
self-tracked data; data visualization; visualization framework; positive psychology
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2024.196
Citation
Shen, Y. (2024) From Data Points to Well-being: A Design Framework of Self-Tracked Data through the Lens of Positive Psychology, in Gray, C., Ciliotta Chehade, E., Hekkert, P., Forlano, L., Ciuccarelli, P., Lloyd, P. (eds.), DRS2024: Boston, 23–28 June, Boston, USA. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2024.196
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Conference Track
Research Paper
Included in
From Data Points to Well-being: A Design Framework of Self-Tracked Data through the Lens of Positive Psychology
The "Quantified Self" movement has grown, with more people using self-tracking tools to monitor everything from physical activities to emotional well-being. This study investigates the interplay between self-tracking practices and positive psychology, highlighting their collective potential to boost personal well-being. Integrating self-tracked data with principles like strengths, resilience, and personal growth allows for the transformation of mere metrics into compelling stories. The paper presents a de-sign framework that is influenced by classroom projects and the examination of data presentation in health and fitness apps. This framework manages the complete data lifecycle—from collection and organization to interpretation, presentation, and finally, harnessing data—with an aim to nurture positive emotions, acknowledge personal significance, and encourage growth. It seeks to merge the self-tracking data process with key tenets of positive psychology, turning raw data into actionable insights that foster positive behaviors and enhance the effective-ness of self-tracking tools in promoting user well-being.