Talk / Ethics
Attentive Design – A quest for a sustainable model of attention
Julia Racsko
If we stopped tracking our attention as time spent, and start treating it as a living connection
between us and the outside world, could we create a mentally sustainable digital media environment?
Would you measure how much you enjoyed going to the beach by the minutes you were in the water? Would you strive to maximize the time spent in the water? No?
Then why do we think using time spent as a success metric is an appropriate way to track attention online? The evidence is there: optimizing for it damages our mental and emotional well-being.
So I did what I usually do when I’m down: I started to draw. Which helped me understand what other aspects of our attentional capacities matter. My talk will introduce a new, visual model to observe, record and show how we focus. Using it hopefully will bring more flow into all of our lives.
About the speaker
Julia Racsko
I’m a Berlin-based interaction designer who never stops drawing. I’m particularly interested in preserving a varied emotional landscape in our design processes and to fit our models and frameworks to our lived experience and not the other way around. The topic of my talk stems from my master’s research built on connecting various ideas from the fields of philosophy, psychology and design, as well as deep interviews with practicing designers.