Designing for Human Sustainability: The Role of Self-Reflection

There is a growing realization that the notion of sustainability should encompass the aspect of human energy as well as environmental resources. Indeed, many HCI researchers have already concerned themselves with designing persuasive technologies leading towards human sustainability. Self-reflection plays at least two critical roles in these initiatives: (1) it is frequently used as a research method to understand behaviors and inform design; (2) technology-mediated reflection can be provided as a system feature that catalyzes learning and behavior change towards more effective management of human energetic resources. We argue that automatically-captured first-person-perspective images can add utility to both routes by augmenting participants/users' self-reflection process.