Hosted by the Design and Computation Group
Department of Architecture
Introduction: Onur Yuce Gun, PhD, Design & Computation
Organized by Theodora Vardouli and Professor Terry Knight
While people have long employed technology to record and reflect upon their bodily and emotional states, the present historical moment is witnessing a dramatic expansion in the practice and scope of self-tracking as we are offered an ever-expanding array of computational devices and software with which to measure, assess, and modulate our daily actions, habits, and rhythms. My talk will consider the novel modalities of agency that emerge from this media by focusing on competing designs for personal mood-management technologies: those which involve selves in “active” tracking involving self-report and analysis; those which enroll selves in “passive” or “frictionless” tracking systems that require little to no self-reflection or input, allocating the work of sensing and “making sense” of the self to digital technology and algorithms; and those which dispense altogether with sensing and simply work to shift individuals’ inner states. A close examination of the design of sensor- and algorithm-based self-regulation devices, I argue, offers a telling view onto cultural anxieties and sociopolitical debates over the place of autonomy and individual responsibility in contemporary governance.
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