Making Technology Healthy

Pawel Woźniak slides Tue, 13.03.2018

In this session, we focus on discussing how can we design technologies to promote the wellbeing?We discussed several topics such as:

  1. The health status in the EU, where recent research showed that “we need to be happier”.
  2. The challenges for designing health solutions that do not only focus on health but also on “meta wellbeing”.
  3. The recent directions in research for the area such as:
    1. Reflection: we should focus on showing what matters to the user from the experience, not just numbers (e.g. present running experience through music I listened to, special things on the road, scents and not only the total time spent in the run).
    2. Mindfulness: if technology helps us think about what we do to our bodies -> we would be happier (e.g. think about your food content for 5 minutes every day).
    3. Social: Technology has the possibility of making necessary activities less lonely (e.g.: 1) drone with a sign cheering for a running person = sense of presence as if a person was there, 2) sending remote cheers by a click-of-a-button to encourage a running person)

Activity: Reframing of products

We used the reframing technique ( slides) from the design thinking to investigate wellbeing technologies. Reframing is investigating technologies in the light of new contexts. Wozniak proposed three wellbeing technologies: trackers, scales, and fitness apps. 2 groups worked on reframing trackers, and another two worked on scales. Afterwards, each group presented three use cases for their technology. The photos summarize the output from the groups.