Contemporary climbing culture—specifically bouldering—and supporting technologies largely frame success through measurable performance outcomes of route completion and grade progression. While alternative perspectives emphasize climbing as a reflective and experiential practice, climbers often struggle to engage with these values due to internal barriers such as fear of failure and perceived inadequacy. These barriers are shaped by rigid and often conflicting “good” in climbing: a purpose and motivation of why one engages with an activity.
To address this gap, we prototype and design an LLM-based coaching system designed to support climbers in reflecting on and reconstructing their understanding of “good” through conversational prompts.. The system guides users through a progression from outcome-oriented problem framing toward identifying situational tensions, uncovering underlying self-beliefs, and redefining their engagement with climbing.
This research aims to contribute a novel design direction for interactive systems that support physical practice as a site of reflection and meaning-making, highlighting both the potential and challenges of using LLM-mediated dialogue to intervene users’ experience and values.