Just a week to go for deadline for this workshop on the Designing for Reflection on Experience that Corina and I are organising at CHI. Much of the time discussions of user experience are focused on trivia and even social networking often appears to stop at superficial levels. While throwing a virtual banana at a friend may serve to maintain relationships and is perhaps less trivial than it at first appears; still there is little support for deeper reflection on life, with the possible exception of the many topic-focused chat groups. However, in researching social networks we have found, amongst the flotsam, clear moments of poinency and conflict, traces of major life events … even divorce by Facebook. Too much navel gazing would not be a good thing, but some attention to expressing deeper issues to others and to ourselves seems overdue.
Note submission deadline extended until 7th November