Incingarette: Blending concepts and crafting animated parables to track smoking

Abstract

Previous work in HCI about personal informatics and behavior change suggests that representing data in intuitive metaphors and meaningful stories on glace-Able displays should be considered to complement typical data visualization for daily user reflection and understanding. Informed by insights from social psychology, providing information regarding one's behavior (i.e., feedback) should (1) link behavioral data to positively or negatively valued outcomes; (2) show changes in the outcomes over time; and (3) include measures for pursuing different outcomes. Grounded in metaphor and blending theories from embodied cognition, we suggest metaphorically mapping less intuitive behavior-outcome links with more direct cause-effect relations from seemingly unrelated yet familiar domains. A behavior and a comparable scenario are cognitively compressed into an "animated parable". This paper describes the theoretical framework and design guidelines, and reports the development of a blended concept, "incingarette" (cigarette and incinerator), and its prototype. The work-in-progress informs updates on design recommendations.