Designing for Wellbeing-as-Interaction

This paper introduces the concept of wellbeing-as-interaction. Instead of designing and evaluating technologies that locate wellbeing in the individual, this paper presents early-stage work on designing technologies for people to collaboratively express, interpret, discuss and enact wellbeing. To explore this concept, we examined the wellbeing of six pairs of university students through a 7-day deployment of a technology probe 'MoodCloud'. MoodCloud consisted of a mobile app and an ambient display to share wellbeing updates through colour. We observed three patterns of wellbeing interactions: updates, follow-ups, and message chains. Wellbeing interactions benefitted from the ambiguity of colour and a clearly defined target audience, but students also communicated through other channels to make sense of updates and to enact support. The concept of wellbeing-as-interaction seeks to offer an analytic lens for the CHI community as well as inspiration for novel wellbeing technologies that emphasise meaningful interactions with friends.