Formative studies of SAL, simple situated ambient loggers

The SAL (simple situated ambient logger) is an infrastructure and interface designed to enable people to do logging. They can use it to configure what they want to log each day and they are able to place their logger in a convenient location that works for them. Their logged data is stored in their personal store and the SAL's interface shows a history of their progress in the last month. This paper describes the user view of the SAL logger and reports two formative studies of SAL, the first a general auto-ethnography study by the authors and a second, small study for logging food intake. Our key contributions are the insights from these formative studies of the SAL loggers.