Meaningful Technology

A fellow PhD student and I recently shared some thoughts about the grad student life.  There are so many distractions available to us that it is difficult to get focused.  There is so much compelling content on the Internet that I have to wonder how many millions of hours of time has been wasted in meaningless activities.  For example, I once spent the better half of a weekday afternoon watching zombie movie clips. Film has a way of sucking you in completely. The experience of film and especially a story is that you escape from your present world and dive into make-believe. Over and over, I saw the typical zombie scenes: protagonists desperately fighting off zombies, hapless victims getting torn apart, zombies chewing on human flesh, etc ad nauseam.

Once in a while, my attention fell out of the movie and I realized I are only looking at a person (not a zombie), chewing on something which you are to believe is a human leg.  When I had run out of clips, I felt disgusted at myself and went for a walk just to clear my mind. Outside in the real world, there were no flesh-eating zombies and not a every-man-for-himself, apocalyptic world.

And then I thought to myself, “Why?” Upon reflection, I had just spent the past few hours engaging with an artificial world I had constructed with the help of computer.  What was the point of it all? As life begins to imitate art, it seems we have so much time on our hands to indulge in pointless fiction.

At this point, my classmate’s critique of the Meaningful Technology project comes in: Aren’t we free to choose what we do with our time and our lives? Apart from cases of clear addiction (is it actually clear or is there a spectrum), we make choices as best we can in any moment and we face the consequences, whether regret or fulfillment.  “What are you proposing?” he asked, “That we eliminate film, music, and fiction? Who decides what is meaningful and what is not?”

While we do make choices, at the same time we might not be fully aware of our making choices.  Many of these choices seem innocuous or they seem like a good idea at the time.  Or we simply choose to take up a technology that seems neat and cool but later becomes addictive and absorbing (without our noticing).  Assuming that people have free will and they are the best arbiters of their fate, if technology increasingly shapes how we live our lives and what we make of it, can we sit up and reflect and truly decide whether what we do is meaningful? Can people reflect on the purpose of the current moment and do so within the greater context of their lives?

This is an important question for both users and designers. Designers ought to understand the implications of creating a loyal user base that is engrossed in their designed experiences. Is the experience they are trying to create meaningful to the user, even assuming that their free choice is not a sufficient validation? Consider the situation when they have created something so compelling, the user does not pause and think about the role the technology plays in the context of their lives. Perhaps it is just shiny or an obvious enhancement over the current state. When advertising is a major revenue stream for any particular technology, users should be keen to understand that it does not matter what they do so long as they stay engaged with that website or system.

I have heard sentiments that the Meaningful Technology project is paternalism. However, we cannot dictate what meaningful technology is.  Even if we claimed to know what was best, no one is obligated to listen to us. What we can do is empower end-users to seek meaningfulness in their adoption of technology.  We want is for people to snap out of the interactions they are engrossed, see it within the context of their lives, and ask “What is the point of it all?”  We want technology designers to ask the same question.

This blog is a start of a conversation about meaningfulness in technology design and will try to answer the question of “how can we design technology so that it is more meaningful?” Answering this question may tell us what is “meaningfulness” and how or if meaningfulness can be part of technology design, our interactions with technology, or new patterns of meaningful living supported by technology.
Our search for what is “more meaningful” comes with an implicit claim: technology as it currently exists is not very meaningful. Perhaps this is a bit extreme, but I believe it is a common experience, especially in our internetworked times, to engage in activity where we are lost and drawn into a seemingly pleasurable activity only to emerge minutes (or hours) later, as if we had awaken from a dream. Even in the process of writing this article, the feeling of uncertainty of what to say and the agony editing-while-writing arose I had moments of pleasure-seeking desire. I went to a social news website (reddit.com), checked out what my friends were doing on a social networking website (facebook.com), and wrote some email. Diversions and enticements from compelling web sites and interactive experience lead us from something funny to a thought-provoking thing and then to another thing that provokes our outrage. When we run out of things to entertain ourselves with, we pop back into reality, as if emerging from a movie theater into the afternoon daylight. We chastise ourselves about how meaningless those moments were and then we try to return to the reality of what we really want to do.
This saga will repeat itself again, not just for me, but for many other people and across a swathe of activities, from entertainment activities like online video clips or games to expressive activities like continuing an inside joke or crafting a long, but thoughtful rant that is read by a person or two and is then forgotten in vast ether of the Internet. All of these behaviors were enabled by technology as exists today, whether intentionally designed or not.
More questions arise: is it the technology that is not meaningful? There is nothing specific about the design message boards or video sites that lends itself to meaningless uses. Is it culture the technology is used in that creates an environment for pointless absorption? Is it in the individual who has a weakness for distraction that gets absorbed in experience? Of course, the business goal of “sticky eyeballs,” which is a holdover from the first Internet bubble, is itself an incentive for creating engaging interfaces where users are lost in the experience. When experiences can be designed to be engaging in these ways, do we have any real freedom as users?
We must eventually find a positive definition of meaningfulness, where we can say what it is rather than describe what it is not. I acknowledge that meaningfulness can be personal or social, but are there any objective (non-personal) aspects of meaningfulness? This blog will explore some of these definitions of meaningful from multiple academic and contemplative perspectives.
Another question we hope to make is that technology should in fact promote meaningfulness. Technology exists as media and media is often a carrier of meaning, which has some kind of relationship to meaningfulness. This argument will evolve on this blog but it is clear that technology is pervasive and shapes how we live. How we live shapes and influences what we live for.
As the primary contributors, Craig Warren Smith and I, we hope to bring several communities of readers to this blog to weigh in on meaningful technology:

• Interaction, industrial, or user experience designers
• Researchers studying Human-Centered Computing or Human-Computer Interaction
• Philosophers of technology, living or deceased
• Psychologists interested in questions of the self, identity, and happiness.
• Sociologists who can describe how media affects society and how technology use is taken up by culture.
• Thinkers from spiritual or contemplative traditions
• Users of technology seeking something “better.”

Topics of interest include:

• Meaningfulness (duh)
• Design Ethics
• History of technology
• Phenomenology of experience
• Psychology of happiness, experience and attention
• The nature of freedom and free will

Although this article may have had some philosophical musings and we encourage contribution from academia, we hope to keep this discussion accessible and grounded in real experiences.  Academese is highly frowned upon.