Constructing Everyday Well-Being: Insights from God-Saeng (God生) for Personal Informatics

Paper Title

Constructing Everyday Well-Being: Insights from God-Saeng (God生) for Personal Informatics

Publication Info

• Topic area: Cultural narratives and their integration into Personal Informatics (PI) systems for well-being.
• Keywords: God-Saeng, Personal Informatics, well-being, cultural narratives, self-discipline, sociotechnical systems, existential HCI, value negotiation, self-improvement, South Korea.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Existing PI systems focus heavily on tracking and achieving measurable behavioral goals, often neglecting the subjective, cultural, and existential dimensions of well-being. This limits their ability to address the deeper, value-laden aspects of everyday life.
• Significance: Understanding how cultural narratives shape well-being practices can inform the design of PI systems that better support meaning-making and value negotiation, moving beyond mere data collection and goal adherence.
• Motivation and related work: Prior HCI research has explored cultural practices and existential dimensions of technology use but has not sufficiently addressed how PI systems can engage with culturally situated well-being practices. The God-Saeng phenomenon in South Korea offers a unique lens to study these dynamics, highlighting tensions between productivity, authenticity, and broader values.

Solution

• Proposed approach: The study examines the God-Saeng phenomenon as a sociocultural and socio-technical practice to derive insights for designing PI systems that support value negotiation and meaning-making.
• Novelty:
  1. Provides a situated account of how young adults in South Korea use sociotechnical routines to construct well-being amidst precarity.
  2. Highlights tensions in well-being practices (e.g., consistency vs. flexibility, authenticity vs. performativity) and their implications for PI design.
  3. Proposes design directions for PI systems that foreground values, support negotiation, and engage with cultural contexts.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • Conducted a 10-day probe study with 24 participants (aged 20–26) in South Korea.
  • Participants identified personal values and enacted "bite-sized missions" grounded in these values.
  • Data were collected through workshops, mission reflections, and follow-up interviews, analyzed using thematic and interpretivist methods.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • Participants framed God-Saeng as purposeful, consistent, and self-improvement-oriented but experienced tensions between these ideals and broader values like relationships and rest.
  • Sociotechnical infrastructures (e.g., planning tools, accountability mechanisms) stabilized routines but also intensified pressures toward self-monitoring and performance.
  • Participants reinterpreted well-being by embedding personal values into everyday actions, often finding meaning in small, unplanned moments.
• Advantage over baselines: Unlike traditional PI systems that prioritize metrics and adherence, this approach emphasizes value negotiation, cultural sensitivity, and the subjective dimensions of well-being.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Participants engaged in a 10-day mission phase, designing and reflecting on actions tied to personal values.
  • Data sources included workshop transcripts, mission cards, and interviews, analyzed through thematic coding.
• Limitations and future work:
  • The study is culturally specific to South Korea and limited to a short 10-day period.
  • Future research could explore longitudinal studies, comparative analyses with similar trends (e.g., That Girl Challenge), and prototype PI systems that embody the proposed principles.

Summary

This study examines the God-Saeng phenomenon in South Korea to explore how cultural narratives shape well-being practices and inform PI system design. Findings reveal that participants used sociotechnical infrastructures to stabilize routines but faced tensions between productivity and broader values like relationships and rest. The study proposes design directions for PI systems that support value negotiation, meaning-making, and cultural sensitivity, emphasizing the need to move beyond metrics and tracking. These insights contribute to designing PI systems that better align with users' lived experiences and cultural contexts.