Interactions - September/October 2009

with fame beyond the website. BodySpace invites popular members to professional photo shoots with the intention of being featured in bodybuilding magazines like Flex or Iron Man to promote the website. This means that not only hard work in the gym but also self-promotion on BodySpace can lead to fame and strengthened commitment.

The flipside of success and popularity on BodySpace is that people predominantly present themselves in positive ways and leave out the negative accounts of sacrifice. It is easy to find competition success stories. People share accounts of defeats or injuries to a lesser degree on BodySpace, and it is virtually impossible to find a blog entry in which someone admits withdrawing halfway through the preparation for a competition.

that encompass both aspects of the duality also facilitates a theater where devotion and sacrifices are displayed and appreciated. Addressing these challenges with a holistic view is crucial, because technologies and leidenschaften shape each other and affect fundamental aspects of being human: how we spend our time and energy, how we feel about ourselves, and how we relate to others.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS Bernd Ploderer is a doctoral student at the University of Melbourne and a visiting student at Sheffield Hallam

University. Ploderer is interested in CSCW outside the traditional office workplace. His current research explores how people orchestrate social network sites with other resources to pursue their passions.

[ 2] Le Dantec, C.A., Poole, E.S., and Wyche, S.P. “Values as Lived Experience: Evolving value sensitive design in support of value discovery.” In Proceedings of the 27th international Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2009): 1141–1150.

Conclusion

Passion and leidenschaft have long been a central issue in philosophical debates about human values. With the recent renaissance of human values in HCI [ 2, 3], leidenschaft has also become a genuine issue for interacting with and through technologies. Our research makes a contribution to the debate on human values in HCI by relating leidenschaft with the use of existing technologies. Leidenschaft inherits three interrelated dualities, and technologies both reduce and increase them. People utilize technologies as tools to improve their performance—tools that help them work toward goals—but they fall short in managing personal limitations. People engage with online communities that provide a sense of belonging but

also pose challenges in terms of trust and may even further social isolation. People also adopt technologies as theaters to display their commitment to an activity. The theater provides an audience for accounts of devotion, but often lacks accounts of sacrifices.

The practical significance of the dualities lies in the implications for the design of technologies for other leidenschaften. The major discrepancy in the case of bodybuilding is that BodySpace succeeds in addressing the pursuit of a leidenschaft in all its ways—achievement, belonging, and devotion—but is limited in incorporating the management of the various sufferings—limitations, social isolation, and sacrifice. Our findings indicate that users of BodySpace must find other ways to deal with suffering, often with the help of a close bodybuilding friend or on their own. The main lesson learned for the design of new technologies for passion-centric activities is that focusing on the positive aspects of a pursuit is not enough. Addressing both sides of the duality opens up opportunities for technologies that might be radically different from current ones. Tools that capture progress and achievements also need to reflect the limitations of people and support critical and constructive reflection. Community technologies must focus on strengthening trust within the community. Beyond that, technologies should support the exchange of information across communities in order to stimulate innovation and to break up misconceptions. Having a tool and community

Peter Wright is a professor of human-centered design at Sheffield Hallam University in the U.K. His recent research includes I T support for chronic illness,

experience-based co-design of health services, and innovative approaches to user research.

Steve Howard has worked
in many areas of HCI,
including usability engi-
neering, use-centered
innovation, and “post-
usability” interpretations of
user experience. Howard’s current primary
focus is “IT in the wild”—mostly mobile and
pervasive computing applied to problems
of real social need.