This year’s Designing Interactive Systems conference (DIS’24DIS’24), which took place in Copenhagen, included a presentation on a PET Lab experiment by James Arnéra entitled “Digital, Analog, or Hybrid: Comparing Strategies to Support Self-Reflection“. In this study, students from the University of Lausanne’s ORSEE pool were given one of three different variants for a tool that encourages self-reflection/introspection. This study aimed to observe how an identical design (in digital, analogue, and hybrid versions) would influence participants’ self-reflective capacities after six weeks to understand the strengths or weaknesses of each approach.
The tool’s design derives from earlier findings in a large-scale survey, “Contemporary self-reflective practices: A large-scale survey“, examining competent self-reflectors’ practical approaches. After six weeks with the tool, it was possible to discern significant improvements – particularly for those in the hybrid paradigm. This work highlights the importance of modality in tools intended to alter our introspective processes, suggesting that specific approaches may be more effective than others. These results bring us closer to more optimised ways to think about and design these systems, which could be invaluable supports for professional and private situations where reflection is a crucial attribute to foster.
