To Örebro University

At a time when everyone is expected to take responsibility for but also optimize health (Petersen and Lupton, 1996) and pursue a ‘healthy living’ (Petersen et al., 2010), apps, 'self-tracking' and ‘everyday analytics’ become crucial. In this paper I examine the design of a self-care application, Lifesum, in relation to its socio-political context. More specifically, the purpose of the paper is to show how the design of the app not only shapes how practices that affect health, such as healthy eating, exercise and social engagement, are represented and communicated, but how the design itself reproduces and encourages certain ideas, values and actions that are highly valued in contemporary society. Previous research shows that apps and self-tracking devices contribute to self-monitoring and self-advocacy (Sanders, 2017; Doshi, 2018) and enable self-government and self-care (Whitson, 2015). However, not many studies critically examine the practices, ideas and values that the design of these apps promotes or facilitates.

The data consists of data from the Lifesum app. The study draws on the principles of multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA) (Machin and Mayr, 2012) using a discourse-design approach (Ledin and Machin, 2016). More particularly, I explore how practices that affect health are represented through writings, quantifications, spatialization, graphic shapes and icons, temporality and causality. I discuss how the design serves certain purposes and how it interacts with the user and encourages certain choices. The analysis shows that a sustainable "healthy life", as represented by the Lifesum app, should be understood in relation to values such as choice, individual freedom, personal responsibility, agency and consumer loyalty. Design is central to the process of shaping the user into a "good" and "healthy" citizen.