Capra: Making Use of Multiple Perspectives for Capturing, Noticing and Revisiting Hiking Experiences Over Time

As the practice of hiking becomes increasingly captured through personal data, it is timely to consider what kinds of alternative data encounters might support forms of noticing and connecting to nature as well as one's self and life history over time. To investigate this emerging design space, we designed Capra — a system that brings together the capture, storage, and exploration of personal hiking data with an emphasis on longer-term, occasional yet indefinite use. Over four years, our team adopted a designer-researcher approach where we progressively designed, built, refined, and tested Capra. This process produced frictions in terms of balancing unobtrusiveness, transforming hiking data into evolving interconnected elements in the archive, and managing the sheer quantity and diversity of information with our goal of supporting open-ended and ongoing engagements. It is these insights that emerged through the practice-based design research approach involved in creating Capra that we reflect on in this paper.