Narratives of Balance — explorations into self-tracking
How do we recognise balance? How do we experience it? Is it something measurable?
Our team embarked upon a self-tracking journey to find ways to translate our experience into data, and open up to overlooked dimensions of ourselves that could enrich the concept of digital twins and balance for paralympians.
In this sprint, Sprint 1, we continued exploring how Digital Twins technology could help paralympic athletes reach and maintain balance throughout their daily lives. We had already identified the importance of emotions and their core role in our behaviour, as well as their impact in our well-being in the Maker’s Sprint (Sprint 0).
But, before we could come to a clearer understanding of athletes’ challenges toward reaching balance, we first wanted to understand what reaching balance means to us individually and as a team. We ran a 1-week, self-research project to explore the meaning of balance in our daily lives. Each of us developed our own method to track balance, resulting in four unique experiments.
Why Balance?
Although “balance” is one of those concepts that refuses to be universally defined, it is universally relevant. This term makes sense in any discipline, industry or context, and even when referring to ourselves. It is a sort of harmonious state between things, and a promise of plenitude that we aspire to reach. From the versatility of this term according to the context it is used in, we can perceive that balance sways between subjective and objective dimensions, meaning that our emotional selves have a strong influence on our behaviour and experience of the environment.
From a human perspective, balance points to a synergy between the different spheres in our lives: from psychological, emotional to romantic, health, fitness, professional spheres. It ranges across subjective and objective dimensions. Reaching balance is having holistic agency over these spheres, and having the power to improve ourselves. Maybe this explains why technologies have turned their attention to this topic, evolving into an ocean of new apps and wearable devices that support us in our pursuit for balance.
Self-tracking technology
Personal observation and reflection has been a constant across civilisations. In Ancient Greek and Chinese philosophies, improving the self can take place through self-examination. An explosion of self-tracking technologies follow up with this quest for understanding ourselves through data gathering, to identify patterns in our behaviour and daily experiences.
These technologies monitor our hours of sleep, the calories we’ve consumed, the steps we’ve taken a day, or the medications we are administered. They’re also very handy: they’ve been conceived to fit the palm of our hand, all functionalities are at the reach of our fingertips and witness most activities through our days. Not to mention that some of these can be worn as jewelry pieces, expressing nuances of our lifestyles. These technologies make it possible to somehow capture our days in apparent detail, allow self-reflection through statistics, charts and emojis… and at the same time they’re here to make shifts in our behaviour.
From a personal perspective, the ‘red-thread’ may be missing that relates all these different measurements, and projects a more holistic view over one’s well-being.
Our self-tracking experiments exploring balance
We explored our own notions of balance through a 1-week tracking experiment. Let alone to our own interpretations of balance, everybody in our team opted for diverse techniques and resources that supported each of us individually, in our pursuit for balance.
Sleep Narratives — Alex
Alex’s first instinct to understand his experience of balance was by tracking his sleep. By using the Apple watch sleep tracking app, he recorded his sleeping behaviour for over a week. This method displays a pattern chart based on collected data from Alex’s body motion, and would allow him to set goals to reach his desired pattern.
While the technology can collect quantitative data on the length of his sleep, the data itself is not enough. It is not yet connected to a context that helps Alex understand the origin of his good or bad resting experiences during his sleep. He felt the need to complement his tracking with added notes throughout the day, describing how energised or exhausted he felt. Then he juxtaposed these qualitative inputs with the charts on the Apple watch screen.
The association of the data displayed by the app, with his diary entries (with events and thoughts) throughout the day, gave Alex a slightly more holistic understanding of what are the activities, moments and behaviours in his routine that may be affecting his sleep (positively or negatively).
After this week of tracking, Alex began to go to bed earlier than before the tracking and got to the conclusion that balance can also be achieved through good quality sleep.
Diverse activities, emotions, and balance — Marketa
To Marketa, the combination of diverse activities throughout the day creates a feeling of balance. In addition to keeping track of her daily activities, Marketa supported herself with the PANAS scale of affect, and associated certain emotions with her experience during each activity.
Her choice for this methodology gives us a glimpse into how her emotional state has an important impact in how successful she is at these activities. This self tracking activity meant an opportunity for her to see how the PANAS method could help her name and cluster the subjectivity of her emotions, and gain some insights into her routine.
She found that having to manually track and classify her experiences was annoying, and affected how she felt about the self-tracking activity itself. Although she would’ve found it handy to have an automatic classification of her emotions( instead of doing it by herself), at the same time distrusted the fact that a device can automatically track her and give her a genuine analysis of her state of balance.
Marketa’s method would allow her to reflect on the emotional value she attaches to certain activities, and gives her more agency over how to tackle the emotions that negatively affect her success at each of them.
Panoramic view on emotions — Valentina
The great advantage of the panoramic view, is the capacity to understand how the elements in the landscape relate to each other. This idea brings us to Valentina’s (the author) self-tracking experiment, who focused on mapping the ways her emotions condition her daily experience. To her, being able to maintain balance is synonymous with having agency over how emotions affect and frame her interactions with the environment.
Her main resource to map her emotions was a set of cards, called The Box of Emotions by TiffanyWatt Smith, which contains rich and colourful graphic designs that illustrate a wide range of emotions, some of which she never heard before.
She kept a diary in which she recorded short narrations of her daily activities, along with the emotions she could identify throughout each of them. At the end of each day, she would match her daily diary entries with an emotion from the set of cards.
As an outcome, Valentina crafted a landscape of emotions per day.
We tend to identify ourselves with our emotions. But gaining a macro perspective over how these come together throughout our days, can allow us to pinpoint the events that have been evoking specific emotions. Valentina learned to take more distance from her emotions, have more mastery over her reactions, and even relate herself to new emotions.
This experiment sheds light on the educative side of self-tracking, and how colours, shapes and the use of space help to express complex feelings that overcome words.
Stone mirrors
Elisa opted for a metaphorical approach to self-tracking. For her, balance swings between focus and anxiety, which she represented through stones of different shapes and sizes.
Elisa associated her experiences throughout the day to the physical qualities of the stones, and their arrangement. Devoid of graphs and statistic charts, the metaphor of the stone attaches material value to her process of reaching balance. This method suggests a certain distribution of weight and lightness, mass and scale throughout the week; revealing how personal the interpretation and layered the experience of balance can be.
Looking back into her process after this week, Elisa could take perspective over her experience, which is usually a difficult task when she was submerged in the moment. She learnt to better identify what was causing her to be more passive or more active, stressed or focused, and finally be able to allocate her energy rightfully throughout her day. In Elisa’s as well as in Valentina’s experience, we noticed how being able to gain this perspective is important to enjoy being fully immersed in whatever they engage in.
In a nutshell
Having been actively engaged in shaping our own self-tracking methods, gave us insights into the never-ending interpretations of balance. Not only did each method give us glimpses into what matters to each one of us in the process of maintaining balance, but also triggers ideas on how to merge their most meaningful aspects.
Opting to explore such distinct self-tracking methods doesn’t only speak to the creativity, but to the evidence that balance can be expressed in endless ways, and that there is a sensorial dimension worth continuing to explore in how we reflect upon ourselves.
More than being able to keep track of our data, the question is how much can we actually learn about ourselves through these experiments? How do our chosen methods reflect what is important to each of us in the process of reaching and maintaining balance? Does balance mean the same to everybody?
What we learned
A few key insights that emerge from our research:
- Reaching balance requires much more than simply tracking our data. Collected data and biometrics need to be anchored to a context in order to have impact and meaning, hence the reiterative need to keep a diary next to each method. In order for self-tracking to be meaningful, it needs to build a language that speaks to the self-tracker. However, self-tracking in itself is time intensive. It takes work to add this interpretive layer and even colours our experience of reality.
- Taking distance: understanding the holistic overview is powerful. Holistic reflection enabled by self-tracking helped put individual moments into a wider perspective. This enabled us to take distance from individual moments and increased our agency to tackle our emotions, stress, etc. to master our reactions.
- Insights into our behavioural and emotional patterns help us build future, better habits. It is important that self-tracking allows space for self-reflection, rather than venturing to give us immediate solutions. The ability to understand the reasons that cause us to go out of balance, were the points at which we could learn the most out of our experiences.
- Endless creative and sensorial expressions for data tracking are possible. There is an undeniable contribution from the use of colours, shapes, materials and spatial dimensions that give an experiential or metaphorical dimension to data, thus help create narratives around it.
What’s next for us?
There is a strong relationship between self-tracking and the Digital Twins technology that we would look to continue exploring and defining.
We will be experimenting with forms of immersion through VR/AR and other technological mediums, that touch upon other senses. We are interested in the translation of data into expressive environments and moods.
We acknowledge that self-tracking is mainly concerned with the ‘self’, which is private and personal (given that it is fed by the user’s innermost data), but we noticed a public dimension to it that refers to our interactions with the outer environment. This public side ties us back to the idea of the Digital Twin, who aims to embody more meaning than mere representation.
These explorations have and will continue to nourish our main research on the paralympic athletes experience of balance, and bring wealthier expression for the Digital Twins.
