Srishti Archive

Most Personal Informatics technologies today are based on frameworks borrowed from behavior change theories, resulting in a focus shift from the self to the behavior to be changed. The "self" that these instruments quantify thus is reduced to the single behavior/parameter tracked, and the self-knowledge that they actually provide is mere information about how the user behaved in the past. We as designers should be looking at bringing a shift in the "self" in Personal Informatics from the cognitive-behavioral paradigm to the constructivist paradigm. This means Personal Informatics should reverse the point of view through which it looks at its constitutive elements, by providing subjective meanings instead of supposedly objective information.