"A Postcard from Your Food Journey in the Past": Promoting Self-Reflection on Social Food Posting

Food-posting, a pervasive practice on social media platforms, opens a window for introspection on personal food intake, physical health, and mental well-being. Existing self-reflection tools on food intake usually require manual logging of dietary information and inadequately support retrospective reviews beyond the data. To facilitate in-depth, non-judgmental self-reflection on information hidden in food-posting, we propose a design to transform general food posts into "a postcard from a past food journey". The postcards are procedurally created from food posts, and encode nutritional values together with the user's emotional status extracted from photos and texts. After validating the visual design, we evaluate the auto-generated postcards with 20 participants to explore how they reflect on the data, context, action, and value subjects. Qualitative feedback indicates that our designs encourage users to review their physical and mental well-being differently from conventional visualization. We conclude by discussing issues identified with the non-judgmental postcard design.