11 March 2015

Reviewing reflection in design: lack of definitions

Reference: Baumer, E. P., Khovanskaya, V., Matthews, M., Reynolds, L., Schwanda Sosik, V., & Gay, G. (2014, June). Reviewing reflection: On the use of reflection in interactive system design. In Proceedings of the 2014 conference on Designing interactive systems (pp. 93-102). ACM.

Abstract: Designers have demonstrated an increased interest in designing for reflection. However, that work currently occurs under a variety of diverse auspices. To help organize and investigate this literature, this paper present a review of research on systems designed to support reflection. Key findings include that most work in this area does not actually define the concept of reflection. We also find that most evaluations do not focus on reflection per se rather but on some other outcome arguably linked to reflection. Our review also describes the relationship between reflection and persuasion evidenced implicitly by both rhetorical motivations for and implementation details of system design. After discussing the significance of our findings, we conclude with a series of recommendations for improving research on and design for reflection.

Notes:
1. little work actually explicitly defines what reflection is, and even less grounds the definition in a conceptual or theoretical framework
2. a majority of work using colloquial or implicit definitions of reflection and as a result presenting the concept as fairly limited in its scope
3. without a clear explicit definition, many of the papers we reviewed implicitly conflated reflection with feedback
4. Most of the papers we reviewed described reflection as an individual, largely mental or cognitive activity, e.g.,reflecting on one’s performance as a given task [44,62] or observing data about one’s self [25,55,56]. A few papers did acknowledge the possibility of reflection as a social activity.



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