Self-tracking has the potential to help users gain self-knowledge and achieve goals, yet the rigidity of many personal informatics (PI) systems limits users' autonomy in defining personal tracking scenarios. This can lead to imposing normative views or reinforcing existing inequalities. To address these concerns, design scholars have suggested more open-ended solutions, but the operationalization of open-endedness in sensor-based tracking is still underexplored. This pictorial illustrates our research-through-design process, exploring the design space between closed-ended and open-ended sensor-designs. We contribute 1) a triadic framework of our conceptualisation of open-endedness in sensor-based PI systems, 2) insights from users interacting with 28 paper sensor prototypes to track aspects of collaboration, 3) design exemplars illustrating how designers could open-up closed-ended self-tracking designs or add guidance in open-ended ones. This more nuanced view could eventually support users in appropriating self-tracking technologies and reduce some of the negative societal implications brought by PI systems.

Manipulative designs — i.e., dark patterns — have pervaded online interactions in most sectors from e-commerce to social media, banking, and healthcare. Understanding how individuals experience and cope with online manipulation is essential to support evolved design practices and regulatory measures. Yet studies on populations who may be more vulnerable to online manipulation are scarce. Through a series of “magic machines” workshops, we investigated the experiences of older adults (N=31) with online manipulation, their needs, and the strategies they imagine to resist manipulative practices. Our results show that participants tend to attribute manipulation to an “unknown” person and do not distinguish platforms from content. Through their machines, they expressed four primary needs to resist manipulation: knowledge, awareness, right to sanctuary, and control. Our study contributes insights into older adults’ experiences with online manipulation and brings design challenges for effective countermeasures to manipulation that address the needs of all users.

Collaboration is considered an essential skill necessary for work and life in the 21st century. It is hence necessary to support students in developing this skill, whose necessity is amplified by hybrid work and globalization. In this vision, we bring insights and practices from the personal informatics field to the education domain, in order to trigger self-awareness and collective sensemaking. We propose CoSensUs, a physical self-tracking kit for teams of students to track and reflect on their collaboration practices and experiences. We argue for a user-driven, open-ended, playful, and privacy-centered solution, which would track and visualize data on a group level. This original and underexplored focus on group-level tracking also aims to account for the special needs of students, subject to social pressure and potential control in institutional settings. Through this vision, we contribute to the development of essential social and collaboration skills, in an original, playful and inclusive way.