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Understanding and designing technologies for everyday mindfulness beyond meditation for mental well-being

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Abstract

Mindfulness is a powerful tool that helps individuals increase their awareness of the present moment non-judgmentally, thereby supporting mental well-being. Given its evidence-based benefits, numerous mindfulness technologies have been developed to make mindfulness practice more accessible, particularly to teach novices how to practice mindfulness meditation. However, little research has focused on supporting individuals in integrating mindfulness into their daily routines. Taking a research-though-design approach, my dissertation work explores the design of mindfulness technologies beyond supporting meditation for mental-wellbeing. Through semi-structured interviews with 20 mindfulness practitioners, I obtained an in-depth understanding of the characteristics of daily mindfulness experiences and the roles of technology in everyday mindfulness. Based on these insights, I conducted co-design magic machine workshops with 30 mindfulness practitioners to further explore the design space and design considerations of technologies to support this practice. Building on this, I applied a 3-month autoethnographic study and conducted interviews with 10 mindfulness teachers to gain a nuanced and comprehensive understanding of live-stream meditation from both the audience's and the streamer's perspectives. This dissertation provides a rich empirical understanding of everyday mindfulness and technology use, a comprehensive design space to inform the design of mindfulness technology better situating it in one’s daily activities and supporting meaningful mindfulness journeys, and an extension of the co-design magic machine workshop protocol that can be adapted to explore other well-being topics.

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233 pages

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Date Issued

2023-08

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Keywords

Co-design; Everyday Mindfulness; First-person Methods; Human-computer Interaction; Mindfulness Technologies; Well-being

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Union Local

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Committee Chair

Leshed, Gilly

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Committee Member

Won, Andrea
Jung, Malte

Degree Discipline

Information Science

Degree Name

Ph. D., Information Science

Degree Level

Doctor of Philosophy

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Government Document

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Attribution 4.0 International

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dissertation or thesis

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