Last week started with bad news: our coach Marco found out that he needed unexpected surgery. This meant that we have to go on without him for a little while, so he can recover properly. We miss him a lot and in order to show that, we made a CD with everybody’s favorite song here at the MediaLAB. In addition to that we’ve made a video of everybody saying “Get well soon” in their own language, which gave some very surprising and funny results (Shin!). You could say we take care of people getting healthy in a multifunctional way (we also try to share our carrots with everyone in the office here, but the others do not like it as much as we do).
You can find the spotify playlist over here.
On wednesday we had a meeting with Margreet. She wrote her thesis about using quantified self for daily activities and which ways are the most useful to present the info provided by self-tracking. For her research she especially dived into the use of Fitbits, which we are now using. The Fitbits track your step count on a daily basis and they estimate the amount of calories you burnt so far. We made a group consisting of the four of us, so we’re able to see how much the others walked the last 7 days and can try to get to the top of the chart. However, we found out that in the first day this resulted in everybody walking around in the office trying to get more steps, but later on we didn’t care much about who had the highest step count anymore. The most annoying part was that it didn’t accurately track cycling, still counting it as walking or not tracking it at all. For us this means that if we want to use the quantified self, we have to find out a more interesting and accurate way to present the self-tracking information.