Paul (Whitmore) Sas · E*TRADE, XpcXpts
Interaction Design for the Quantified Self

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Benjamin Franklin confessed in his Autobiography to tracking and analyzing aspects of his personal behavior; certainly long before Ben, counting and writing enabled self-reflective monitoring (& control) of human behavior. Yet, in 2007, when the Quantified Self's first meetup occurred at Kevin Kelly's home in Pacifica, it was sparked by the realization that something is happening here, but, to paraphrase Bob Dylan, we didn't know quite what it was. The group's founders recognized that people today are generating huge volumes of data as they go about interacting with their phones, computers, cars, etc. It's also increasingly easy to instrument behavior with additional sensors. The QSelf movement attracts people who collect, analyze, and experimentally manipulate tracked streams of data. The proliferation of tracking techniques & methods today reminds me of reports of the Homebrew Computer Club, which began meeting in Menlo Park in 1975. The current state of the QSelf field seems analogous to the early stage of personal computers, before the incredible potential of the technology was liberated by progress in interface design. Paul will briefly review some of the more interesting light weight tools for self-tracking, before moving to his main topic: what interaction designers still need to do in order to fully mobilize the power of the Quantified Self. By directly addressing psychological dimensions, such as motivation, attention, and the dynamics of identity construction, as well as the complex interplay between our goals and passions, interaction design can embed these physical tracking devices into a system that empowers individuals to take greater control of their health, mood, money, and more. The final point of the talk examines how science may well be revolutionized when millions of individuals willingly explore their own physiology, psychology, and social network via the tools of the Quantified Self.

Paul Whitmore Sas, experimental designer at XpcXpts (pronounced "Experience Experiments"), studied psychology at Stanford from 1994 to 2000. His dissertation identified the Delmore Effect, which is relevant to finding those contexts that facilitate high-priority goal formulation. While at Stanford, he interned at Xerox PARC in the User Interface Research Group. For the past ten years, he has applied behavioral economics to improve the customer experience at E*TRADE. Paul is an active member of BayCHI, co-coordinating the general meeting speaker series since 2004.