Flexible and Mindful Self-Tracking: Design Implications from Paper Bullet Journals

Digital self-tracking technologies offer many potential benefits over self-tracking with paper notebooks. However, they are often too rigid to support people’s practical and emotional needs in everyday settings. To inform the design of more flexible self-tracking tools, we examine bullet journaling: an analogue and customisable approach for logging and reflecting on everyday life. Analysing a corpus of paper bullet journal photos and related conversations on Instagram, we found that individuals extended and adapted bullet journaling systems to their changing practical and emotional needs through: (1) creating and combining personally meaningful visualisations of different types of trackers, such as habit, mood, and symptom trackers; (2) engaging in mindful reflective thinking through design practices and self-reflective strategies; and (3) posting photos of paper journals online to become part of a selftracking culture of sharing and learning. We outline two interrelated design directions for flexible and mindful selftracking: digitally extending analogue self-tracking and supporting digital self-tracking as a mindful design practice

Sketching in HCI:Research practice & publication (Advanced)

Sketching in Human Computer Interaction is a valuable tool for subjective practice, but also a tool for engagement with collaborators, stakeholders, and participants. This hands-on practice can be utilised in a variety of contexts. The course enables those already in possession of sketching skills the confidence to take their work to the next level. Drawing from expertise gained by working in both academia and industry, the instructors will lead course attendees on a journey through practical applications of sketching in HCI, from subjective sketching to participant engagement and publishing, using hands on tasks and group activities. © 2020 Owner/Author

Visualizing the Data City, Social media as a source of knowledge for urban planning and management

There is growing interest across a wide range of subfields of urban studies in understanding the role played by location-based social media and the impact of the increasing availability of urban digital data from different sources. The way people experience the city is affected by a complex, dense, and reactive information landscape: the data city presents itself with an unprecedented quantity of information in the form of geo-located comments from Twitter, reviews from Pickles, and check-ins from Foursquare. This fragmented proliferation of information generated by urban inhabitants offers potential benefits both for the research community and urban decision makers, who can use the data to generate broad and analytical visions of the uses of urban space. This book explores and presents methods and tools to collect, analyze, and represent time-based geo-located social media data at the urban scale. The aim is to investigate possible perspectives for the use of these data as a source of knowledge for urban planning, de-sign, and management. We ask whether geo-located social media data can be useful in the creation of indicators of urban life as it is perceived and communicated by city users. In fact, although traditional data collection methods such as surveys, interviews, questionnaires, and, more recently, data harvesting and analysis techniques (e.g., using geographical location data from mo-bile devices) have provided interesting insights into the social life of urban spaces, nowadays, they can be complemented using geo-located social media data. On one side, the book reviews the existing literature, projects, and approaches related to data visualization and the geo-located social mining techniques used to investigate topics of urban interests. On the other side, the book presents the design experiments we conduct-ed in collaboration with urban stakeholders at various levels and in various US and European cities. These case studies document our research activity with geo-located social mining techniques and offer some insights distilled from our experience. As a conclusion, we propose recommendations for the exploitation of geo-located social media data in order to answer hitherto un-solved urban questions and—as such—to generate knowledge for urban planning and management

Polyphonic images of the cities. Mapping new human landscapes through User Generated Content

'Visualizing the crisis' is a research project that explores the potential of text mining methods applied to geo-localized user generated content in order to extract and analyze the emotional reaction of Italian people to the current political crisis. The project focused on building a platform that harvests and integrates real-time data streams coming from geo-localized user generated content and then applies text mining processes in order to extract users' emotional reactions and plot them on a map. The project started analyzing users' emotional temperature in the two major Italian cities (Rome and Milan) in November 2011, when Silvio Berlusconi lost his parliamentary majority and Mario Monti was nominated Prime Minister. The idea behind the project was to create a framework to continuously listen and monitor urban actors' emotional reactions and enhance their sense of agency and their responsiveness during the current period of political and economical transformations in Italy. The paper introduces the theoretical background and the technological characteristics of the platform and presents a short selection of interesting patterns and urban stories we came across during the early phase of the study. Some relevant images are presented and discussed as well