Designing for Mindfulness: An Exploration of Interaction Design with Biodata Inspired by Chinese Aesthetics

The Quantified Self (QS) movement and self-tracking technologies in personal informatics are opening up opportunities for users to manage their health and wellbeing. Until now, researchers have explored how to monitor health and change people’s behaviors through bio-sensing technologies. From a perspective of design, interaction design with biodata has many possibilities. There is an increasing level of interest in mindfulness for its potential benefit as a wellbeing practice to improve quality of life. The mindfulness movement, which advocates viewing the body, self and life with an accepting and non-judgmental attitude, brings a perspective of attentive awareness in the present moment. Over the last few years, technologies related to mindfulness and research endeavors in HCI have increased dramatically, as can be seen from the growing number of academic publications in this field. Moreover, researchers have started to explore mindfulness integrated with interaction design from different directions and for different purposes. In this thesis, I attempted to explore interaction design with biodata from a mindfulness perspective. By analyzing previous research, I found some opportunities in 1) a design space of non-judgmental awareness of the body, 2) a design approach inspired by Chinese aesthetics, 3) a design medium of physical interactive artifacts. In order to explore workable design tactics for practicing the concept of mindfulness, I drew on inspirations from Chinese “Wu Hua” aesthetics and the approaches used in some related artwork. Beyond that, “Wu Hua” provides a view of seeing the body as an inseparable part from the rest of the natural world and living with it harmoniously in an aesthetic experience. These inspirations triggered me to probe into more possibilities of design. I aimed to investigate the following research question: How can we design with biodata for mindfulness inspired by Chinese aesthetics? In short, my work makes two main contributions. The first contribution is a conceptual contribution. Specifically, I have integrated mindfulness and Chinese aesthetics into interaction design to inspire ways of viewing the body and designing with biodata. The second contribution is a practical contribution. I practiced the idea of Chinese “Wu Hua” aesthetics and the approach of “externalizing the self to an incarnation” in two design projects. As a result, this thesis contributes to a design concept of “non-judgmental interaction” and some de