What follows is a slightly edited copy of the first version, written in a one-sided Slack conversation.
craw [9:05 PM]
Ha! The alarms on my phone are keyed into a schedule I haven't been following. The alarm that just rang said "Write"
[9:06]
Looks like I'm right on schedule!
craw [10:14 PM]
Ha! I had typed a good bit & in my distraction with learning how to draw, I lost what I typed. What a great lesson in principles for stream of consciousness : use the tools you have in the moment and say what you mean without worrying about phrasing. Had I not been editing a paragraph in the input field, it would've been preserved in channel. Let's add minimizing premature optimization to the list of goals in mindful design.
craw [10:39 PM]
https://open.spotify.com/album/49LA20VMk65fQyEaIzYdvf Spotify The Flaming Lips - Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots (U.S. Version)
This album's great for helping me channel my mindfulness. I've been practicing joyful crying using the third track as a sort of meditation guide. I think finding or creating a source of joy to practice with can be a really helpful thing to boost mindfulness. After someone told me about joyfully crying I wanted to figure out how to experience it. I don't remember if she noted that it's something that needs to be learned through practice or if I guessed that it did. But I was singing to the third track and the image of Yoshimi as my recovery self and the robots as my addict self popped into my mind. I got a little choked up for a brief moment & when I asked myself why that was, it was out of joy! So I started playing with that mental image, tweaking it each time I listened to the song & was feeling present. It took a few iterations and then the first tear dropped. A few more and I'd have burst into tears laughing with the tears coming before the laughing. The first mental image may not have been intended to be used as a way to practice joyful crying, but I realized it could be the seed for on. That's how I created a source of joy to add to my design toolkit.
[10:43]
So ok...here we go. Stream of consciousness time. This is a manifesto. I want my ideas to be clear, so I must manifest them. That means show & tell in this context. Let's look at my little intro about joy & see what's shown...
craw [11:17 PM]
So I've told a story about a mindfulness practice for cultivating vulnerability because I thought it'd be useful in this design manifesto. Why do I think that? Because it's in my design toolkit. Did I choose to put it in there? Nope. I'm just now realizing I consider it a design tool. Why? Because the toolkit I'm using is the union of all the mindfulness things and all the design things. Easiest toolkit to determine if a tool belongs to it. I just ask myself "is this a thing that's related to mindfulness or design?" If it is, throw it in. I'm going to start this design theory off with well-defined, broad constraints at the highest level. I think it's easier to transition from a general concept to a more specific one. What about the design/mindfulness practices that “don’t work”? They go in along with the contexts in which they do work. Some of those contexts may need to be imaginary in order for the practice to work. So be it. This is all about choosing a practice that works for the moment’s contexts and needs. There will be times when the practice of choosing a practice requires imagining the opposite context. By defining mindful design as the union of mindfulness & design, as opposed to merely the intersection, we maximize our options. This allows for radical inclusion of others’ ideas by default.
I’m noticing questions popping into my head:
“Isn’t that too generalized? What about paralysis in the face of too many choices?” One difficulty in making decisions when faced with more than a handful of options is what happens when there isn’t a convenient algorithm or heuristic to easily follow for making the choice Cultivating intuition and learning how to use it can help here. Another issue that comes up is an unwillingness to accept the outcome of the choice. Mindfulness requires detachment from the outcome of our actions, so if there’s unwillingness to accept, seek a mindfulness practice for the moment. This also naturally helps in the case of uncertainty surrounding the outcome.
Side note: We are always capable of accepting any outcome, even death. Many are unwilling to accept outcomes they view as undesirable. Many also prefer to hear their unwillingness described as inability. Might be worth being mindful of that. Nonviolent communication would say that describing someone as unwilling or unable to do something when they haven’t described themselves that way is merely diagnosing them.
“What if something related to design isn’t mindful?”
Pair it with something that is? Maybe what’s needed is a path through the union down to the intersection of mindfulness & design?
[11:18]
Ok...I've been writing for others and worrying about grammar. That's getting in the way, so let's see if I can loosen up a little more.
[11:18]
I haven't been singing. Time to restart the album.
[11:20]
Noting where my head's at while writing this shows me being open. Admitting something's getting in the way is me displaying honesty.
craw [11:41 PM]
Enough in the moment meta. Back to what I was showing in the story. I used mostly I statements because I'm currently writing something meant to teach. When I teach, I want to explain my perspective & have it heard, not dictate one for others to adopt. I don't want to tell you how to think. I want to give examples of how this works right at the very beginning. No laying out definitions or anything like that. This isn't meant to be read just once. Regularly reviewing it will help lead the rest of the theory to emerge & I have not idea what that'll be like. I do have an idea how it might propagate, though: in a mindful manner. How bout this:
I'll choose two code words. One for this version and one for the next. I'll put them right here...like this. {current: shibboleetism:, next: thenextshibboleetism}
To be clear, this is a way for changes to this manifesto to be propagated to help the theory easily adapt as it grows. I hope that this section will evolve so as to allow for easily finding alternate/parallel/derivative versions ("forks"...oh wait, should this be on github, maybe?).
When I had the idea of codewords just now, this comic popped into my head. https://xkcd.com/806/
So I'm calling the codewords "shibboleetisms." They're words on google with 0 results that will be used as the version name of each manifesto version and each manifesto will have a pair in brackets on it with its version's name & the third's name. Or it'll introduce some other mechanism. We'll find out! I'm not calling them something specific for the sake of creating a buzzword, but I'm sure some people will use it in that way. Oh well...maybe we can poison it somehow. What if I say right here that anyone using the word "shibboleetism" in conversation is using it as a buzzword? Programming languages often have reserved words that I can't use to name things in my program. Maybe we can have reserved words, too. And there can be explicit uses defined for them.
craw [12:38 AM]
"shibboleetism" is a reserved word that can be used to name the version of this doc or as a buzzword. There we go. No judgment in there. I'm not saying using it as a buzzword is bad or wrong. Like all labels, buzzwords have uses. Using something as a buzzword contributes to the dilution of its meaning because more contextual definitions are being added to the meaning. Unclear meanings hinder clear communication that will be perceived as authentic. That can be by design, though, since hindering clear communication causes buzzwords to die out of overuse. Right now, "shibboleetism" has two meanings. As it gets used as a buzzword, I'm guessing there are at least 2 things that could happen: it loses its meaning & it requires people to acknowledge that they're using it as a buzzword. We want the old versions of evolving things to die out, so this is how old manifesto versions will expire...their names literally become more meaningless over time. Authentically using the word will be essentially required because people will likely google it if they don't know its meaning and find this manifesto and at the top they'll read something to let them know that if they got here because of someone using that word, they were knowingly using it as a buzzword.
[12:38]
Still doing a lot of self-editing....time to breathe...
[12:39]
Anyway, I could be wrong about how that whole buzzword thing plays out, but let's try it and see what works.
[12:40]
^ That's me showing a basic design principle.
[12:41]
Humility & experimentation. (Being able to identify my own humility is a thing I can do without being arrogant, though I'm not quite sure how to define it yet. That's room for improvement.)
Oh...and the brackets for the codewords are there to help people writing programs who need to easily extract the version names.
[12:45]
So that story...
craw [12:46 AM]
This album's great for helping me channel my mindfulness.
I've been practicing joyful crying using the third track as a sort of meditation guide.
I think finding or creating a source of joy to practice with can be a really helpful thing to boost mindfulness.
After someone told me about joyfully crying I wanted to figure out how to experience it.
I don't remember if she noted that it's something that needs to be learned through practice or if I guessed that it did.
But I was singing to the third track and the image of Yoshimi as my recovery self and the robots as my addict self popped into my mind.
I got a little choked up for a brief moment & when I asked myself why that was, it was out of joy!
So I started playing with that mental image, tweaking it each time I listened to the song & was feeling present.
It took a few iterations and then the first tear dropped.
A few more and I'd have burst into tears laughing with the tears coming before the laughing.
The first mental image may not have been intended to be used as a way to practice joyful crying, but I realized it could be the seed for on.
That's how I created a source of joy to add to my design toolkit.
craw [12:47 AM]
Time to start bullet-pointing or I'll never sleep...
[12:47]
- Observations & feelings, but what needs were underlying the feelings? Mindfulness, maybe, but there's also a hidden need that's implied by the mental image I'm using: health. (edited)
craw [12:55 AM]
- There's also more to the story...the mental image evolved, but I didn't say what it became. Mindful design includes ways to recognize & uncover those deeper emotional connections.
[12:55]
- describe image that made me cry & the underlying need
[12:58]
- it's important because design is for solving problems and insufficiently met needs can serve as signals for potential room for improvement.
[12:59]
Here's how I think about needs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_human_needs
[1:00]
This started out with fun synchronicity. I had this great little blurb about it & lost it. Let's see if I can draw it out again....
[1:03]
Why was it fun? Oh right...cause I experience more synchronicity when being mindful.
Some of it's caused by me subconsciously seeking it out more when I'm mindful, so people may not agree it's an interesting coincidence. Other times, like with me wanting to write just before that alarm fired, is not only improbable, but widely perceived as improbable, too. Or like quietly, unknowingly falling in love with someone and then finding out their birthday mirrors mine, forming palindromes (1/28:8/21 and 8/21:1/28). Neither of us were able to influence that outcome...what are the odds?! No, really...what are they?
[1:13]
Let's try to approximate the probability of that happening. I think there's some way to at least loosely calculate it, but I'm way rusty on my probstat stuff. I'll ask around. Anyway, let's calculate the probability of things like that, even if it's just the relative probability (exact prob of two people with mirrored birthdays meeting + some unknown prob that we'll just label "chance of one person falling in love with the other" and another labeled "chance of other person reciprocally falling in love").
[1:15]
When I'm feeling present/mindful, it seems like the number of times coincidences with a low chance of being subconsciously influenced happen goes up along with the ones that maybe I'm just seeing cause I want to. So maybe the number of synchronous events observed & corroborated as occurring beyond some probability threshold can serve as a mindfulness metric.
I like that idea because it's a loose definition...it feels like a flexible thing that could work. We'll find out. So that's why unintentionally starting this whole thing with what I deem a synchronous event is fun to me. I consider perceiving synchronicity a signal for mindfulness.
A lot of this lines up with Dieter Rams’s principles for good design.(https://www.vitsoe.com/us/about/good-design) Can probably use those as founding principles, along with whatever may be founding principles for mindfulness. Nonviolent communication's founding principles would be a good start
NVC can at least serve as founding principles for mindful communication https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_Communication
Another component of mindful design is design thinking. http://dschool.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/METHODCARDS-v3-slim.pdf
Then there's ADD - Attention-driven design
That's where we design with a focus on who/what/when/where/why/how attention is used by people when using a solution. We're going to measure how much attention it costs them and seek to brutally minimize it. Mindful design recognizes technology disconnects us from each other when it requires our attention to be directed away from each other in the moment. There are ways to identify if/when social media increases loneliness, ie. disconnectedness. Be mindful of those things. Don't take attention from someone in a way that increases their loneliness without telling them it may increase their loneliness.
We also don't want to pile on features into a solution that may distract people from meeting their goals/needs.
We also respect people's attention by explicitly not seeking to design things that are addictive. We can work together to meet everyone's needs while making a profit. Addiction prevents people's needs from getting met in the short term. If we want to bank on addicts, we'll have to spend our time making things more addictive in order to sustain profit (as well-conditioned addicts die sooner than non-addicts). Mindful design seeks to improve the quality of life, not harm it. We don't mindfully make things that harm people.
http://www.techtimes.com/articles/18014/20141017/addiction-costing-money-life-infographics.htm Infographics created by Treatment4Addiction show how many years a substance abuser can lose because of their dangerous habits. The online resources offer the best information, especially on proper treatment.
We don't have to believe the figures in those infographics to know that addicts don't live as long as most healthy people. We also want to design ways of identifying and counteracting addiction. It gives us a cause to champion: we seek to make technology safe for people who are predisposed to addiction because technology can potentially harm them. We recognize some people in the world design to create/encourage addiction. We don't judge them. We wouldn't have a cause without them. Their existence is required in order for us to learn how to design against addiction.
Mindful design doesn't judge, period. It evaluates & measures. Subjectivity comes in the form of emotions & perceptions, not as judgments. Mindful design evokes feelings through sufficiently meeting people's needs when they need to meet them while requiring the least amount of attention needed to do so.
NVC implies the use of protective force in identified cases of addiction may be used. The conditions of when is appropriate and to what degree I'm not sure & I don't know how to figure it out yet.
Ex. Slack could have forced me to take a break at some point tonight.
I don't know if/when that's appropriate, but it's worth exploring.
Mindful design is emotionally aware for the sake of measuring when/how needs are met.
In the future, we'll be surrounded by tech that can read our emotions accurately without us even knowing it's happening. Mindful design seeks to explore the implications, ethics, and impacts of technology that can accurately detect emotions before it becomes ubiquitous.
Do our messaging apps let each other know how we're feeling through color changes? Do they try to impact my emotional state? What about identifying my emotional state to me? Wouldn't that impact my state? Where are the healthy boundaries here? How is moderation defined in this context?
If I'm angry, does my phone try to calm me down?
If I'm driving, maybe so?
Does it start saying things to me to calm me down? That seems distracting & could make me even more angry. I don't know, but before my phone does do that, I'll probably need to give it explicit permission to do so. I don't know. This a new area to me & I'm not sure it's been explored by all that many people to begin with.
Ok...I think that's it for now. That felt good and exhausting. I'm gonna treat myself to something & then hit the sack.
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