Interactions - September/October 2009

bodies; we always want more and more.” No matter how much they improve, there is always someone else who delivers a better performance. Thus, the challenge is to remain aware of current abilities and limitations and prepare for the future performance to which they aspire.

The duality around performance creates opportunities for the design of tools that help people move one step closer to their goals. Tools provide access to information, which leads to improved performance. BodySpace is such a tool. It offers a mix of articles about training and dieting drawn from professional writers and users of the system. This information can have an immediate impact on training, but more important, it helps bodybuilders to plan ahead and establish goals. Setting short-term goals and tracking progress is a way of negotiating the duality of performance. On BodySpace, bodybuilders can set their goals, track their progress with statistics and photos, and write about their aims and current status in their blogs. BodySpace saves this information permanently and creates user histories that allow individuals to keep track of their progress. Their true value, however, unfolds when users share their histories with others. It becomes meaningful information from which others can learn and derive motivation, and with which they can compare themselves.

Inversely, such tools also surface a person’s limitations. One of our participants, Lenny, 22, said he was not making enough progress in his training. Comparing his progress

with others on BodySpace, he came to the conclusion that “it might be wise to have a break and then start again.” But many participants criticized the lack of critical feedback in interactions with other BodySpace users. Bodybuilders need critical feedback to work on their limits, but as Jeremy, 50, pointed out: “They are so nice that they can’t give you constructive criticism, because they are like ‘I don’t want to be mean or step on your toes’ when they probably need it. So it’s limited in the information you get.”

These examples illustrate that people use tools to coordinate, improve, and sometimes also to reassess their quests for performance. However, the tendency to use tools for achievements can prevent critical feedback, which would help in dealing with limitations.

Leidenschaft and Connections.

A second element of leidenschaft is to seek connections with others who perform the same activity. Bodybuilders establish connections at the gym and at competitions—although the competitiveness and hierarchies at these places often complicate initial contact. Though scarce, these connections help people to obtain valuable information and motivational support. Beyond that, connections provide a sense of belonging to a community that shares the same interests, empathizes with one’s suffering, and normalizes the sometimes painful activities.

Connecting with a community that shares the same leidenschaft also means the risk of social isolation from the larger community. The ascetic lifestyle of bodybuilders is

not compatible with everyone else’s way of life, as expressed by Jeremy: “You don’t hang out with people that aren’t on the same page, that aren’t into the same lifestyle. Because they are drinking and smoking and eating bad foods and doing crazy stuff.” Even most typical gym users cannot relate to the specific norms and activities of bodybuilding. As a result, many bodybuilders describe a sense of social isolation: “I was a lone, lone wolf,” says Jeremy about his early days at the gym. “It’s a very isolated, individual sport.”

The duality around connection opens up opportunities for technologies to establish and nourish communities based on a shared leidenschaft. Social network sites like BodySpace allow people to establish personal networks within the bodybuilding community. Our findings indicate that beginner bodybuilders in particular use BodySpace to establish connections with other bodybuilders, because their circle of friends often has no interest in bodybuilding.

A major challenge in establishing connections online is trust. We would like to emphasize three interrelated design decisions that have contributed to a generally positive and trustful environment on BodySpace:

BodySpace users are 1. identifiable through their profile information, which is important in establishing contact. Bodybuilders judge other BodySpace users based on the physical achievements displayed in photos and their congruence with other profile cues, like bodybuilding jargon or statistics.