Be like water
Jason Zietz · 2014
Research in personal informatics (PI) depends heavily upon reliable hardware solutions. Unless they are developing the hardware themselves, PI researchers frequently find themselves at the mercy of hardware manufacturers. While working on EMPIRE, a sociotechnical system designed to help motivate people to reduce their electricity consumption, I have been shown repeatedly that I am not immune to this less-than-desirable outcome. In this paper, I will describe the numerous hardware-related roadblocks we encountered, explain how we handled (and continue to handle) these obstacles, and present suggestions to help PI researchers to be like water and adapt to challenging hardware-related problems that often come with PI fieldwork.