"What Are You Really Trying to Do?": Co-Creating Life Goals from Everyday Computer Use

TL;DR

This paper presents a system that infers users' broader life goals from everyday computer activity by combining automated inference with user feedback, grounded in Activity Theory and personal strivings.

Contribution

It introduces striving co-creation, a novel approach that constructs hierarchical activity representations and incorporates user editing to better understand long-term goals.

Findings

The system produces strivings aligned with participants' long-term goals.

Participants gained greater agency over their inferred goals.

The approach outperforms baseline methods in a week-long deployment.

Abstract

Recent advances in user modeling make it feasible to conduct open-ended inference over a person's everyday computer use. Despite longstanding visions of systems that deeply understand our actions and the purposes they serve in our lives, existing systems only capture what a person is doing in the moment -- not why they are doing it -- limiting these systems to surface-level support. We introduce striving co-creation, a process for inferring broader life goals from unstructured observations of computer use. Grounded in Activity Theory and Emmons' personal strivings framework, our system progressively constructs a hierarchical representation of a person's activities. Crucially, strivings are difficult to fully resolve from observation alone, as the same action can be driven by many different goals. Our system therefore supports an editing interface that gives people agency over how they are understood by the system, feeding their corrections back into subsequent rounds of striving induction. In a week-long field deployment (N=14), we find that our co-creation process produces strivings that are representative of participants' long-term goals and gives them greater agency than baseline methods.