Hobbyist Academia #47
Inspired by some of my reading the past couple weeks, I’ve been trying to notice moments when I default to scrolling on my phone when I could be looking around, people watching, and letting my mind wander. Moments when I’m walking, waiting in line, eating a quick breakfast at the kitchen counter, during a commercial break watching television. Instead of picking up my phone out of habit, I’ve been trying to interrupt the pattern and stay in the world right in front of me.
It’s a little jarring to observe how unthinkingly and automatically I reach for my phone, even as someone so steeped in the research about attention and our relationship to the digital world.
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Read
I enjoyed this interview about the interdisciplinary nature of design systems and the underlying problem solving skills in each contributing discipline.
A recent edition of Café Anne chronicled the author’s experience at Dopamine Land, a themed “immersive experience” space similar to a museum but mostly created for documentation on social media. I was particularly intrigued by her descriptions of the tech-enabled aspects of the experience and how and when they failed and required manual, human intervention.
Matt Klein recently interviewed Seth Godin about strategy. It’s exactly what you would expect from the conversation: cultural strategy meets marketing.
In a recent edition of The Reboot, Randy Ginsburg offered a screen time analogy that really clicked for me in a new way: we bring our phones everywhere like they’re emotional support animals, and then spend time petting them instead of focusing on the people in front of us. He discusses ways to improve communication and have more phone-free hangouts.
The Growth Equation offers a more scientific lens on the same observation with “Save Your Brain, A Digital Survival Guide”. We all feel like we can’t focus because our time spent on our phones is fragmenting our attention. With intention and practice, we can restore our cognition with things like reading physical books and letting ourselves be bored. This article also has some great analogies, including our phones as adult pacifiers and ourselves as the mouse in the rodent experiments on chronic fatigue.
Engage and Interact
IKEA’s annual Life at Home Report is a research project about all aspects of home: how you arrange the space, how you decorate, and what you can do and how you feel within the layout. The recently released 2024 report focuses on how to make a home a joyful escape from the world.
Frontier Magazine has relaunched with a new focus on storytelling as a powerful tool for connection and change.
Alyx is a new project and tool that aims to help users build relationships and community. It draws upon science-backed strategies and daily practice.
Chalant is a new kind of social media for music superfans to support their favorite artists and connect with each other within a new digital space. My favorite part of the explanation in the LinkedIn post where I first learned about it was “death to the doomscroll.”
Zoe Scaman recently shared the presentation deck from a talk she gave about leaning into our uniquely human competencies as we decide and design how to work in relationship with AI. Soul in the Machine is a living, breathing work in progress.
Listen
Randy Ginsburg of The Reboot also just launched The Kanso Show, a podcast exploring how to coexist with technology while maintaining our humanity and reclaiming our attention from a digital world designed to take it from us.
Save This for Later
Just one new book added to the To Read list:
Shatterproof: How to Thrive in a World of Constant Chaos (and Why Resilience Alone Isn't Enough) by Tasha Eurich
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