Lock up the lighter: Experience prototyping of a lively reflective design for smoking habit control

Abstract

Mobile apps have been employed in assisting people to control various addictive habits including smoking. These apps track users’ behavior mainly via self-reporting, which demands users’ patience in making explicit input. This paper presents Lock Up, which requires users to lock their lighters in a smart case connected to an app. It heuristically estimates the continuous time of a user without smoking and metaphorically overshadows the lighter by foregrounding the smoking consequence due to the accessibility of the lighter. After reviewing major behavior models, we extend the notion of lively interactive systems grounded in cognitive science and phenomenology, and introduce a design framework promoting behavior control via provoking imagination and reflection. An experience prototype of Lock Up has been built for participants to use in the laboratory environment. The evaluation is exploratory and generative, providing qualitative data to enrich the proposed user experiences and informing orientation toward the next iteration.