[community] Tracking and recording, or choosing not to track and record

[Harnum, Alan]

Hello inclusive design community,

Part of the Inclusive Design Research Centre's work on Preference Exploration and Self-Assessment (https://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/%28Floe%29+Preference+Exploration+and+Self-Assessment) is revolving around metrics, journaling and other "self-tracking" activities. We're obviously interested in a wide variety of dimensions around this and thought we'd throw some questions out to the community…

So if you're comfortable sharing or otherwise have some thoughts along these lines, we're curious about questions like:

  1.  What kinds of things do you journal or track about your life?
  2.  What kinds of tools (digital or analog) do you use to do so?
  3.  What kinds of journaling or tracking have you tried and abandoned, and why?
  4.  Are there things you have considered or wanted to track, but haven't? What kept/keeps you from doing so?
  5.  What kinds of things do you have strong feelings about not tracking, and why?

I'll share one from my end to start off: I track my dreams, and have on and off for about fifteen years now. I record:

  1.  A basic description of what happened in the dream.
  2.  Basic type of dream: good, neutral, nightmare
  3.  Keywords for elements or themes that appear (especially if they're recurring ones) like:
     *   House I grew up in
     *   Failure in school
     *   Superheroes

I do this partly because I find it an interesting window into my unconscious mind but also because I have a number of friends who are also interested in their dreams, and we like to talk about them.

ALAN HARNUM
SENIOR INCLUSIVE DEVELOPER
INCLUSIVE DESIGN RESEARCH CENTRE, OCAD UNIVERSITY

E aharnum at ocadu.ca<mailto://aharnum@ocadu.ca>

OCAD UNIVERSITY
100 McCaul Street, Toronto, Canada, M5T 1W1
www.ocadu.ca<http://ocadu.ca/>