How's your energy?

How is your energy?

Is it high or low? Is it nervous or excited? Positive or Negative? Is it creative? Spiky? Stuck? Flowing? Free? Big? Blue?

Assuming at least one of those questions lead to some answer in your mind, this post may resonate with you.

Energy is well-defined in physics, yet it is used in so many more contexts and domains. Medicine uses it to characterise symptoms, the fitness world uses it to describe some ‘fuel-like essence’, psychologists have discussed energy as a fundamental psychological experience for over a century. However, beyond the physical sciences, energy has no widely accepted definition. This ambiguity has lead many people to avoid working with it.

I see it as one of the most exciting opportunities today.

What is well-being?

At the time of writing, I am a researcher of well-being technologies at the [UCL Interaction Centre] (incoming PhD as well). My main research questions revolve around how tech can support and scaffold people’s well-being.

“What does well-being mean in this context?” - is a question that echoes in my head whenever I state my research interests.

It means nothing. Whilst also meaning everything.

From a pragmatic human-centred perspective, anything that affects your answer to the question “Are you well?” is well-being. What you eat, your social life, how you feel about your work, relationships, your hobbies are all part of well-being.

Despite its breadth, academia resolved this tension by broadly categorising it into three types:

• Physical well-being, such as fitness, diet, and sleep.
• Mental well-being, such as resilience, mood, and motivation.
• Social well-being, such as relatedness, belonging, and relationships.

In all honesty, I think this is fine. It provides enough scope for researchers to ask meaningful questions and conduct suitable studies.

… But it does have one rather noticeable side-effect that I can’t ignore: it divides the experience of well-being. No matter how many acknowledgements fit in the “limitations” section of papers, it still does not do it justice.

In well-being, everything affects everything.

If you’re sick, your productivity falls. If you’re happy, you’re more likely to run or cook for yourself. If you have good relationships, you can rely on them when times are hard.

Ultimately, well-being is ambiguous, but its also intuitive.

… Much like energy.

Everything is well-being, well-being is energy

I’ve been researching personal energy for the past year and am currently working on publishing our first paper on it. I will be eluding to some of the results here - take that with a pinch of salt as big or small as your trust in my honesty.

Lets return to the opening question of the post. How is your energy right now? Is it different from when you started reading?

Hopefully its higher, more positive, or even more creative if it managed to spur you down your own rabbit holes.

In our research, we posited that ‘energy as a concept’ could be used as a device to communicate and conceptualise well-being. Our research attempts to construct a model of ‘energy as experience’ that can inform studies and technology design for supporting energy management.

We found that people delineate between their physical, mental, and social energy similarly to well-being. However, we found that the question “How’s your energy?” lead to incredibly in-depth or colourful descriptors for well-being.

Some of these I offered at the start: high-low and positive-negative. However, people extended it with more categorical or qualitative dimensions as well. People described their energy as ‘stuck’ or ‘flowing’ to describe when they felt agency over their motivations or concerns. They used colours or gradients as a way to compare different events or days. They used shape-descriptors, such as spiky or smooth to describe their sociability - amongst others. Minimal prompting revealed that these schemes could express well-being holistically instead of through academia’s three silos.

Importantly, we found that there are two internal models of what is being managed under energy management:

• Energy as a resource: energy is considered something that is built up and spent. Food, sleep, and fitness often add to energy; tasks and socialisation often spend energy.
• Energy as managed state: depending on the state you’re in, you have a different sense of access to energy. For example, when you feel creative you feel high access. Alternatively, when you’re nervous, you may be aware of having high energy, but you can’t utilise it. Here, Energy Management resembles a map-like navigation between states where people identify how they can exit or get to certain states.

Finally, people had goals with energy. We found a few objectives: offensive and defensive, pertaining to the spending or preservation of energy in a rate-of-return style strategy; sustainable and spontaneous, associated with avoiding burnout and adapting to changing circumstances.

Ultimately, inquiring about energy prompted incredibly rich reflections and holistic expressions of well-being that were inherently manageable due to the nature of most people’s model of energy.

Most HCI researchers would agree: rich reflections and awareness of what is managed is a dream combo for supporting well-being.

Designing for and with Energy

Designers and researchers have avoided energy because it is ambiguous and undefined. It claims no scope and offers little structure.

Academia needs constraints - but they disable designers. After all, how can you support well-being without supporting everything? How could you design for a problem so vague?

The way I see it - Energy can be ambiguous because its intuitive.

Most people have some semblance of a model of what energy is. Even if its not the same as someone else’s, they can still intuit what is meant by the other. For example, someone who considers physical energy to be the only one for them will still likely understand what someone else means by ‘stuck energy’.

That intuition comes from borrowing a mental model from user space and not academia or system space. And that intuition is unreasonable powerful if we can find a way to scaffold for it.

Combined properly with a system-space (hardware/software) ‘objective’ understanding of energy, working with these ‘subjective’ models may offer a holistic language of well-being between users and their devices. Garmin’s Body Battery and various other wearables’ ‘readiness’ scores already attempt to address the resource perspective by inferring one’s energy based on physiological signals. I believe a system that could map out those physical properties alongside journal-style qualitative reflections could be a holy grail for health and productivity software alike.

I invite all designers to think of energy in these terms:

1. Everyone has a sense of what energy is.
2. Energy management can revolve around one or many ‘types’ of energy,
3. There are a million plus one ways to communicate energy with metaphors, images, sounds,
4. Energy as a prompt can reach deeper reflections as a device.
5. Assume what is being managed is either a resource or state.
6. Consider the 4 objectives as your ‘problem space’: offensive, defensive, sustainable, spontaneous,

These points should be enough to start developing tech for supporting personal energy. I have a project ongoing about supporting the communication of well-being using energy as a concept in the Amulet Social Journal.

If you’re unconvinced, you are right to be. I hope to continue working on this over the next few years and aim to offer more real-world insights from both consumer apps and research. Please do reach out if you have ideas or thoughts - it will literally be my job to think about this all the time.

Or if you’d like to try it out for yourself, just ask the next person you meet today:

How’s your energy?

Acknowledgements

This is based on my yet unpublished research. I stand by all claims but understand that this is not commonplace practice and has not been peer reviewed beyond my coauthors and local colleagues.