Meaningful Technology

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.