The Reflection Object: A Useful Concept when Designing for Reflection

Existing literature talks about what is reflected on in terms of examples, such as reflecting on financial expenditures, lifestyle, professional growth, etc. In this paper, we give a name to this: the reflection object.

This paper develops the name and concept “reflection object” based on activity theory, reflection theory, and design-oriented theoretical works on technologies for reflection; as well as based on our understanding of designing for reflection from own past, previously published empirical and design-based research.

We develop four themes for design-relevant considerations around the reflection object. The four themes are i) identifying the reflection object, ii) identifying explanatory contextual information about the object, iii) the object's development in time and iv) the object's representation.

The theme of the object’s development in time, including what should change, how this would be measurable, and procedural aspects of bringing about this change, points particularly at an opportunity for future research, as it addresses that explicit support for transformation is the weakest point in existing reflection technologies.

For practitioners, we have instantiated the above four themes as four sets of questions, to be iteratively used throughout design.