(seed planted — may 2024)
The experience of scrolling through timelines and schedule visualizations is a highly embedded technical pattern today. With every refresh, we summon new ideas, thoughts, and media. We attend to our schedules to orient tasks and plan our days.
When building optimization software, data inputs, hard constraints, and soft constraints make up a few of the ingredients to deliver a suggested path of action. A user can then review the algorithmic results, accept the suggestions, or adjust the output to their liking. Similarly with timelines powered by recommendation systems, we can explicitly instruct models and provide them feedback to better service our experience.
I think to some extent, repeated exposure and consumption of these ubiquitous design patterns and technical systems can seep into our own internal machinations and psyches. We may end up blindly optimizing for mimetic desires.
What’s wrong with this? Perhaps nothing, if we can see it for what it is by recognizing the desire, releasing it, and relaxing into it (see: TWIM). If you’ve been using any online platform for long enough, you’ll likely get caught up in unattended tension. Pulled in to the tides of the rapidly changing historic milieu of our online landscapes. Our inevitable messy humanness permeates through all architectures.
Maybe we should have more signs of caution embedded into our online experiences. Ones that notify us that we are entering daydreaming zones of desire, ambition, and comparison. Clear visual reminders that our habitual ways of modelling and seeing the world are simultaneously being permeated and reframed as we consume this bit of information.
What does an online world look like that plays with these design patterns and seas of data in this creative way instead of implying Truth behind the message? What does it look like to have UX that encourages critical thinking and reminds us of our agency instead of incentivized narrative structures to service adversarial goals?
- TWIM: Tranquil Wisdom Insight Meditation. I highly recommend The Path to Nibbāna by David C. Johnson for an introduction to the practice. This screen grab is from page 24:
“The highest goal of TWIM is to see how each link is dependent on or conditioned by the previous link. When one understands this process in a deep and profound way, the unconditioned state, Nibbāna, arises for the first time. This first instance is the Path of Knowledge. One realizes that there is no personal self or ego, just an impersonal process dependent on conditions.”