A relationship ended recently, and since then, a quiet, steady sadness has lingered with me. As I navigate the emotional weight, I’ve begun to notice something meaningful: what I had learned when conducting HCI research has quietly become a source of nourishment and growth. For the most part, the theories, methods, and tools we use as researchers live in papers, notes, or fleeting conversations. But in moments like this—when I attempt to apply them to understand my own experience—they become real. And they help.
When Research Turns Personal
First of all, I have to admit that my value system strongly shapes the kinds of HCI topics I gravitate toward. I’m gradually inclined toward theoretical and introspective inquiries—questions like why people behave in certain ways, how lived experiences unfold, and what design can offer in response(for example, my Master’s thesis and CHI 2025 paper focus on “designing for reflection”). The lucky part is that, more and more, I can see how what I learn flows back and nurtures me in return. Even when a project never makes it into a publication, it can still be profoundly valuable to me.
Reflection is Power
When dealing with my sadness feeling, I’ve come to believe this: the knowledge I’ve gathered—about why people feel what they feel—can be wielded like a quiet tool, a kind of resilience in the face of emotional discontent.
People heal themselves in different ways—some “run away,” some vent, others overwrite pain with new relationships. After experimenting, I found the method that works best for me: feeling, reflecting, and abstracting to ease emotional pain. I guess this approach was inspired by Experiential Learning [1] (I used it as the theory lens used in my master’s thesis). Because an experience or an emotion is something that really happened, I can keep searching for empirical evidence or theory to explain where it comes from. Along the way I do positive reflection, abstracting meaning from each episode. Understanding why the pain arises, while affirming that every experience has value, makes me feel safe and at ease.
Embrace Bodily Experiences
Of course, reflection isn’t a perfect remedy. Sometimes, theorizing becomes a defense mechanism. Sometimes, no amount of insight stops your body from reacting—crying, shaking, losing appetite. But I’ve tried to stay with those bodily sensations instead of resisting them. When I cry, I observe the warmth of tears, the texture of breath. When I lose my appetite, I notice exactly where that discomfort sits. Paying attention to the bodily experience slows the mental spiral [2]. It’s not about controlling the pain—it’s about witnessing it, with decency and curiosity.
Empowering Myself
So I try to address emotional issues with as much decency as possible: no more shouting, no demonizing or hurting the other to speed up desensitization; more positive reflection; using lived and bodily experiences to understand—and acknowledge—myself. Concepts and methods that were once scattered fragments in my research now line up, showing me how they helped me through a rough patch. That sense of empowerment is huge. In the process of feeling empowerment, I’ve also discovered that I am capable of loving myself—and loving others. I guess if these approaches could be embedded into interactions or interfaces, perhaps they could help others, too.
Looking back, my recent reading in feminism and feminist HCI [3] has shaped how I relate to others. I’ve grown more careful about projecting stereotypes onto people, events, or relationships. I’ve tried to build understanding through experience rather than assumption. At the same time, I’ve become less afraid of being judged. That courage opened space for new experiences during my relationship—some joyful, some painful—but all of them lived with intention. The relationship has ended, but I engaged with it wholeheartedly. I feel lucky.
In truth, many of these thoughts had been quietly forming for a long time. Ironically, it was the lingering sadness that gave me the stillness to finally write them down, to turn thoughts, reflection into self-empowerment. I know I have limits in knowledge, in understanding. But I affirm the effort to bring what I’ve learned into my own life, to strive for a kind of unity between knowledge and action (知行合一). Whether or not my research ever changes the world, it has already changed me. It helps me become a better, more thoughtful version of myself. I think this is the power of HCI research and explains why I love HCI research.
Today is the International Women’s Day. Hope all girls/women find the way to empower ourselves!
Photo taken by Yidan in Yokohama, Japan 🇯🇵 2024.
[1] Kolb, David A. 2014. Experiential learning: Experience as the source of learning and development. FT press.
[2] Kristina Höök, Martin P. Jonsson, Anna Ståhl, and Johanna Mercurio. 2016. Somaesthetic Appreciation Design. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’16). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 3131–3142.
[3] Shaowen Bardzell. 2010. Feminist HCI: taking stock and outlining an agenda for design. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’10). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1301–1310.