It's been a couple of weeks since I got back from the first annual Quantified Self conference, in Mountain View California.  This was a gathering of about 400 "quantters": people who self-track and self-experiment, whether by using hardware devices (like the zeo, or fitbit), software applications, or a computer and Excel. Corey and I attended since our web application, MercuryApp, is a life-tracking journal. We wanted to be a part of the weekend, present our work, and meet and learn more about the community. 

Of the 400 people who attended, approximately 100 presented work, led talks, or created a poster about their work. Because of the high ratio of participants, the community feels very alive -- people are actively making things, breaking things, making them again, and working with each other. The attendees were diverse: there were hardware programmers, health policy makers, visual artists, poets, software developers, PhDs and more, all drawn by some aspect of personal science, mood-, health- or life tracking. The diverse range of interests reminded me a bit of the interdisciplinary nature of ITP, where I went to graduate school, and the energy and interdisciplinary nature of the community bodes well for a new field that I imagine will be a household word in a few years. 

On the first day, I presented MercuryApp in a 5 minute Ignite talk, and then spent the two days going from talk to talk, listening to folks and writing down interesting ideas. There are too many and too diverse to roll into one blog post, but there are a few themes that jumped out at me. 

The conference opened with Gary Wolf presenting a talk called "What is the Quantified Self?".  It was a great opening for some of the big QS questions, especially with regard to the act of tracking itself, which is a central activity of the field. He presented a beautifully visualized data-graph of the last 10 years of his meditation habits, but he focused not on the times he meditated, but on the absences -- the days he skipped.  He used the skipped days as a way to address the concept of habit, and pointed out that despite the fact that he skips quite regularly, he considers his daily meditation a habit. This rang true for me: many things I do "habitually" are often skipped, and yet the skipping does not destroy the habit. This talk contextualized the idea of "relapse" or "falling off the wagon" as not necessarily an enemy of a habit, but as a collaborator in maintaining one.  

The idea of habituation came up frequently in many contexts, and is something that people (not just "quantters") struggle with. How do you, as an individual, adopt a new and healthy habit beyond the honeymoon phase? How does a software application developer make their application easy and frictionless enough to use that a user more than a few times? How do we all in an increasingly distractable world find stability in habits -- do we have to make them games? Is making life into games simplistic? There is going to be a lot of interesting work in the "habituation" (and conversely, "relapse") fields in the near future. 

Patti Brennan of Project Health Design presented another interesting concept she termed "ODL": Observations in Daily Living. This is a theoretical context where health practitioners work with patients to identify their own stories to use as metrics for discovering their emotional state. So, for example, rather than asking a patient to simply record when they are "angry" or "sad", help them identify repeatable times that they feel angry or sad (e.g. their own stories -- "It's Sunday night", "my partner has just left for the week"). Effectively, it's "story-driven tracking" using labels (such as events in their own lives) that the person understands, as opposed to doctor-driven tracking using labels (such as names of emotions), that the doctor understands but may not resonate with the patient. I am very interested to see developments in story-driven tracking, and how this can be helpful to people in maintaining health.  

Margaret Morris, a researcher at Intel, led a session on mood tracking where she wanted to expand the idea of mood tracking from placing oneself on a "happy -> sad" continuum to thinking more broadly about the role of anxiety and discomfort in achievement and daily living. In some of the anecdotal sharing in the room, it became clear that there is a similar journey that people experience when working towards something that is important for them (and that consequently makes them feel "happy" when they achieve it). The pattern involves a distinct stage of unhappiness -- "anxiety" and "panic" were named more than once -- but ends in a sense of increased happiness / well-being. Morris encouraged people building mood tracking applications to be aware of the texture and usefulness of emotions that we tend to label negatively (and thus see as "bad" place to spend our time). There is a certain resonance here between the traditionally "good" connotations of "habit" and the traditionally "bad" connotations of "relapse"  -- that Gary addressed in the first talk. 

The conference ended with a bit of perspective as Kevin Kelly talked about how Information is fastest growing entity on the planet -- with the exception only of meta-data (information about information) -- and that data is becoming a new media in itself. 

I am a bit mind-boggled, and this blog post talks about maybe 1/10 of the fascinating developments in this field, any of which could be expanded into a larger post, conversation, or lifes work.  I'm excited to be part of this community and fully expect to be blogging more frequently about certain aspects of QS as we continue to build our application.  I'll end by saying that I'm really excited to see such a convergence of technologists, psychologists, policy-makers and artists thinking and exploring health and well-being. And if you haven't heard of Quantified Self yet, I recommend bookmarking the blog and learning about something that is going to be much more pervasive and rich in the years to come.