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

Inhwa Song, Kwangyoung Lee, Janghee Cho, Amon Rapp, Hwajung Hong

Abstract

While Personal Informatics (PI) systems support behavior change, everyday well-being involves more than achieving individual target behaviors. It is shaped by cultural narratives that give actions meaning. In South Korea, the God-Saeng phenomenon, encompassing disciplined, collective, and publicly documented self-improvement practices, offers a lens into how well-being is negotiated in daily life. We conducted a 10-day probe (N=24) with bite-sized missions to examine how young adults engaged in God-Saeng. Participants relied on planning practices, accountability infrastructures, and datafication to stabilize themselves, yet these same routines also intensified pressures toward self-monitoring and performance. They navigated tensions between consistency and flexibility, authenticity and visibility, and productivity and broader values such as relationships, and reinterpreted ordinary activities through sociocultural contexts. These insights suggest design opportunities for PI systems that move beyond tracking, toward digital instruments that help users negotiate tensions, make meaning, and reflexively understand how technologies participate in their culturally and existentially situated well-being.

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

Abstract

While Personal Informatics (PI) systems support behavior change, everyday well-being involves more than achieving individual target behaviors. It is shaped by cultural narratives that give actions meaning. In South Korea, the God-Saeng phenomenon, encompassing disciplined, collective, and publicly documented self-improvement practices, offers a lens into how well-being is negotiated in daily life. We conducted a 10-day probe (N=24) with bite-sized missions to examine how young adults engaged in God-Saeng. Participants relied on planning practices, accountability infrastructures, and datafication to stabilize themselves, yet these same routines also intensified pressures toward self-monitoring and performance. They navigated tensions between consistency and flexibility, authenticity and visibility, and productivity and broader values such as relationships, and reinterpreted ordinary activities through sociocultural contexts. These insights suggest design opportunities for PI systems that move beyond tracking, toward digital instruments that help users negotiate tensions, make meaning, and reflexively understand how technologies participate in their culturally and existentially situated well-being.
Paper Structure (34 sections, 2 figures, 2 tables)

This paper contains 34 sections, 2 figures, 2 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Background and Related Work
  3. The God-Saeng Phenomenon
  4. Studying Cultural Practices in HCI
  5. Personal Informatics for Well-being
  6. Contemporary Design of Personal Informatics Technologies
  7. Method
  8. Participants and Recruitment
  9. Probe Design
  10. Group Workshop
  11. Bite-sized Mission Phase
  12. Follow-Up Interview
  13. Data Analysis
  14. Findings
  15. Perceptions and Practices of God-Saeng
  16. ...and 19 more sections

Figures (2)

  • Figure 1: (A) Translated version of participant-generated material. Participants filled out a worksheet about their own definition of God-Saeng, practices. (B, C) They created ‘bite-sized missions’ grounded in the values they have identified during the workshop.
  • Figure 2: Photograph of the manual coding process, where themes and categories were developed by analyzing participant responses from the workshop discussions, journal entries, and interviews. Post-it notes represent the coded data, grouped into related themes for further analysis and refinement.