Bookly

Bookly: An Interactive Everyday Artifact Showing the Time of Physically Accumulated Reading Activity

ACM CHI 2019 Paper, May 5–May 11, 2019, Glasgow, Scotland, UK

Authors: Somi Ju, Kyung-Ryong Lee, Subin, Kim, Young-Woo Park

Abstract: We introduce Bookly, an interactive artifact that physically represents the accumulated time of users’ reading activity through abstract volumetric changes. Bookly accumulates the time of actions (e.g., picking up and putting down books) that users performed for reading and provides a designated space for the ongoing book being read. The results of our 2-week in-field study with six participants showed that continuous exposure to volumetric changes representing the accumulated time of reading activities helped the users to understand their unsettled reading patterns. Bookly also motivated the users to improve their reading behavior by gradually making reading part of their schedules. Additionally, the definite distinction of the ongoing book improved its visual affordance and accessibility for the users to start reading books. Based on the findings, we confirmed the possibility of making intangible data physical for self-reflection to enhance changes in behaviors that are difficult to perform due to weak motivation.

Keywords: Book; Reading motivation; Data Physicalization; Self-Reflection;

ACM Reference format:
Somi Ju, Kyung-Ryong Lee, Subin Kim & Young-Woo Park. 2019. Bookly: An Interactive Everyday Artifact Showing the Time of Physically Accumulated Reading Activity. In 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Proceedings (CHI 2019), May 4–9, 2019, Glasgow, Scotland, UK. ACM, New York, NY, USA. 8 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300614