Toward a language of blended causality for transforming behavioral data into reflective user experiences

With increasingly pervasive integration of technologies in everyday life, more data are generated around individuals' behaviors. Some of these data are accessible to individuals for reflection yet mostly presented in numbers or graphs, or represented by common metaphorical items, like virtual badges. Grounded in embodied cognition theories including conceptual metaphor and blending, and insights from social psychology, the idea of "blended causality" argues that behavioral data should be represented in virtual terms through blending behavioral consequences with users' existing knowledge of comparable causality. This paper emphasizes elaboration of blended causality into multiple imaginative narratives for reflective user experiences and reports the application of the extended guidelines as a creative design support tool in a series of workshops for designing representations of behavioral data. The concepts developed from the workshops vary in topics and blends, showing the effectiveness of the tool and informing a language of blended causality. Designers can use it to delineate representational mappings in terms of embodied experiences for examination and communication with team members like engineers.