Tag: attention economy

Intellectual Production #8 – Attentional Record and Analysis

Brief

Create a table for 12 hrs, keep a record of what you paid attention to (include multitasking with specification of tasks) and for about how much of that hour you paid attention to.

Look for patterns, relationships, cause and effects, etc. to compose in whatever format/medium, a visual representation and analysis of your attentional notes.

Preface

For this assignment, I will restructure my attentional records not on a temporal-basis (due to my inability to perceive passing time in neurotypical fashion), and use a spatial/environmental-basis to delimit my attention span. Having this distinction can also capture Citton’s concepts of environmental wisdom (ecosophy) and attentional dynamics (echology), while providing more contextual and situational account of my attentional experiences throughout my day, afterall, Citton did say that “we are always attentive in a particular situation” (p. 83).

I have made a Genially with a template similar to that of a board-game, as it shows the temporal and spatial aspect as the day progressed. Should the pop-out windows seem too small, feel free to view the Genially in a new tab.

 

Analysis

This day seems to be an outlier in terms of usage of my phone and its impact on my attention, as I had forgotten it at home for the majority of the day. Usually, there would be more back-and-forth texting with my friends, sending of memes on social media, and more frequent distractions  (*ahem*) breaks.

Usually in transit, I would use music and podcasts as a filter to tune out my surroundings to make it less sensory overwhelming. However, without my phone to play music, I could hear all the different kinds of conversations floating in and out of my awareness on transit. On days when I do have energy, it is fun and amusing to eavesdrop; on days when I have little energy, I can feel physically fatigued, and therefore need to be more protective of what I allow or do not allow to pass through me (p. 178).

One major thing I have noticed in my attentional record is the tendency to focus on social interactions with those around me, whether with strangers like the bus driver, or with friends like S, M and T.

Citton talks about joint attention that “involves the shared feeling of a co-presence that is sensitive to the emotional variations of the individuals involved” (p.85), which I think resonates with the feeling of how it feels like to “be seen” by others — the bus driver noticing my sprint, catching the attention of M on his bike, and the mutual recognition and acknowledgement by T.

This feels especially amplified on the day of Lunar New Year where much of it is in spirit is the collective attention to the new lunisolar cycle, and therefore the natural inclination to gather and celebrate together. I value quality time with my friends and family, and therefore, it is where I pay most of my undivided attention to.

References

Citton, Y., & EBSCOhost. (2017). The ecology of attention (English;1;1st; ed.). Polity Press.

Task 10: Attention Economy

-internally screaming- 

This was a frustrating and anxiety inducing hell-scape of a game to navigate through (＋_＋) It felt like one of those escape rooms where you’re trying to find an exit, but the more you click around, the more dead ends you run into!

I first learned of ‘dark patterns’ in my Cognitive Systems undergrad courses on human cognition and design, from none other than Don Norman’s book “The Design of Everyday Things”. He introduces some foundational concepts in design, specifically affordances and signifiers, which I find most relevant to this task.

Affordances are "the possibilities in the world for how an agent (person, animal or machine) can interact with something." In other words, potential interactions between people and the environment.

Signifiers are "signals" for what actions are possible and how they should be done. The must be perceivable signals (e.g. signs, labels, drawings, instructions, etc.) or else they fail to function.

In the slides below, I try and describe what makes these signifiers “unintuitive” or more maliciously, “misleading” when it comes to our everyday habits of navigating webspaces online.

Reflections

For this task, it seems like the signifiers are more important than affordances, as they communicate how to use the design.

In some ways, it almost presumes that there is an “expected” or “intended” way for users to interact with webspaces, whether it is through the many years of priming, or due to the fact that we are forced to change our interactions with each update and iteration of new software. Once we are habitualized to a certain way of interacting with the virtual environment, it almost becomes an expectation that all websites would follow this convention, and therefore our brains fall into autopilot mode, and that is where our attention fail us, especially in this game.

In true UI/UX Researcher style, I asked two of my roommates to play this game and observed their interactions. One of them happens to be a UI/UX designer themselves! Both of them struggled with navigating through these websites, and in similar places too!

For example, in the password set up stage, they both read aloud “your password can have at least 1 Cyrillic character” and both their reactions were “how do you even type Cyrillic characters!?” without registering the important “can have” part!!

Besides the “misleading signifiers”  that miscommunicated what they actually meant, another great challenge of this game was “paying attention” to what we were doing — whether it was reading the instructions fully, or whether it was making sure that certain things corresponded with each other — it required one to exert more cognitive processing energy to respond correctly to not fall into their dark pattern traps!

References

Norman, D. A. (2013). The design of everyday things. MIT Press.

 

 

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