The experience of scrolling through timelines and schedule visualizations is an embedded well-adopted technical pattern today. With every refresh, we summon new ideas, thoughts, and media. We attend to our schedules to orient tasks.
If you’ve built or used schedule and routing optimization software before — input, hard constraints, soft constraints make up the ingredients to deliver an output and suggested path (of action) for who’s schedule you are putting together. You can then review the results, accept the suggestions, or reconfigure the schedule to your liking. Similarly with timelines powered by recommendation systems, we can explicitly instruct the model and provide it 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. We end up blindly optimizing for ambition and desire. What’s wrong with this? Nothing if we can recognize the desire, release it, and relax into it (see: TWIM ). But if you’ve been using any online platform for long enough, you’ll get caught up in the unattended tension.
Maybe we should have gentle signs of caution embedded into our experiences, that we are entering daydreaming zones of desire and ambition and comparison. Because being in the UX of timelines and schedules seems quite ubiquitous and inescapable, this permeates into our habitual ways of modelling and seeing the world — thus to our own aversions and cravings. What does it look like to play with these design patterns and the sea of information instead of we played with these design patterns and the sea of information instead of taking it to seriously think about what we should be doing?
- Tranquil Wisdom Insight Meditation