| Theories around mindfulness are a good start, don't you think? What is missing? I have some thoughts here. Traditional meditation practice is accepting of the tendency of the mind to wander. Such is the nature of our minds. Over time, we strive to improve our ability to focus / concentrate / redirect our attention. But when it comes to socio-technical design we need more than infinite patience around distractions. We probably want and need to evaluate how we do. Tor example: - how often are we distracted?
- for how long?
- why? (is it simply due to our 'wandering' brains? And/or it is more causally connected to environmental factors, such as attention-stealing devices?)
- what interventions work for certain kinds of distractions? Sometimes people are drawn to the notions of metrics. There is value in metrics; there are clear mathematical ways to calculate them. Collecting, them on the other hand, can be quite challenging. But let's not limit ourselves to 'metrics' in the quantitative sense. The reason is obvious: some of our most important goals are not easily put into quantitative terms. Luckily, with vast improvements in text processing, we need not limit ourselves to traditional metrics based on scoring. We must think bigger and broader. With a good set of evaluation mechanisms (again, not just metrics), we don't have to fall back on some indefinite mindset about 'doing better'; we can actually demand that products and services be designed and adhere to basic principles. These principles will probably be somewhat subjective and culturally contingent, but that doesn't discount that they can also be grounded in neuroscience, broadly accepted notions of morality, and tunable according to cultural and situational factors. Does this make sense? |