FEATURE
Autobiographical Design:
What You Can Learn from
Designing for Yourself
Carman Neustaedter
Simon Fraser University | carman_neustaedter@sfu.ca
Phoebe Sengers
Cornell University | sengers@cs.cornell.edu
• An early version of
the Family Window,
designed autobiographically by
Neustaedter and
his collaborators to
connect his home
to his parents’
home across the
country with a
media space video
link. Neustaedter
and his family used
the system for a
year.
November + December 2012
interactions
Designers, developers, and
researchers frequently use their
own systems during design in
order to test concepts, learn
through actual usage, or find and
fix software bugs. In fact, many
would argue this is an important
step before putting a design before
other end users; such “eat your
own dog food” methods have been
applied in industry for years. Yet
self-usage as a means for better
understanding system design has
a dubious reputation within HCI
research, where it appears to clash
with user-centered design prin-
ciples and visions of researchers
as disinterested observers. In this
article, we explore the value of
what we term autobiographical design
as a way of developing system-
atic understanding of a system’s
potential. Autobiographical design
occurs when people build a system,
use it themselves, use this expe-
rience to learn about the design
space, and evaluate and iterate the
design based on their own experi-
ences. Thus, we are talking about
much more than a “dogfooding”
approach; we are talking about
long-term, genuine use, during
which new knowledge is obtained.
