Tag Team: Help and Be Helped via Zoom Breakout Rooms

I am a longtime fan of Liberating Structures and since the pandemic I’ve been working to adapt them to Zoom meetings. One adaptation that’s gone well is Troika Consulting, which I call “Tag Team.” This activity engages trios to help each other through a highly structured conversation. This conversation/structure focuses on a single individual and is repeated three times so that everyone helps and is helped.

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Modifications

The original version of this activity uses a “consulting” metaphor, which I find dissonant in the formal and informal learning spaces that I facilitate, so I use different language. Also, in the in-person version, there’s a period of time where one participant turns their back on the group to listen, but not participate in the conversation. On Zoom, this effect is achieved by having the person turn their microphone and camera off. I also add a step before the groups are formed, so that individual participants can figure out what they want to present to others. Here’s how it works:

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Step One: Gaining Clarity

Because the timing of Tag Team is so fast-paced, I feel it’s necessary to give folks time to think about their problem before jumping in. I generally do this in one of two ways: engaging in a series of quick conversations through speed thinking, or a 10-20 minute period of private freewriting. I usually decide the method based my instincts about the participants, how well they know each other, and how much they trust me.

Step Two: Explaining the Process

The Tag Team process is pretty technical, as far as these things go, and needs to be explained before participants are left on their own to do it.

I use the above graphic in a series of slides where each time I advance the slide another row is revealed (so at first, they only see “Decide,” then I click and they see “Share,” and so on.

First, I tell folks they’ll be put into breakout rooms in threes. Once they get in the room they’ll have one minute to decide who will go first. That person will share their problem, then the other two will ask clarifying questions, then the person who has the problem will turn their camera/microphone off while the other two discuss the problem. Last, the person will turn their camera/microphone back on and reflect on what they hear in an appreciative spirit (not a “I’ve already done that” or “That’ll never work” attitude). All this happens in the time span of 10-minutes, so it’s a quick-paced and very focused experience. The group switches to another person and they repeat the process until everyone has gone, for a total of 30-minutes.

Step Three: Breaking Out into Rooms

I create breakout rooms in random groups of three and give folks a link to this cheatsheet so they can remember the steps once they’re out of the main Zoom room. I open the rooms, wait a minute (while they arrive and decide who will go first), and then send the following fly-in announcements at the appropriate time intervals:

• First person: share what you need help with and why. (2 minutes)

• Other two: ask clarifying questions. (2 minutes)

• First person: cam/mic off. Other two: discuss how you’d address the issue. (4 minutes)

• First person: cam/mic on. Reflect on what you heard. (2 minutes)

• Time to switch! Second person: share what you need help with and why. (2 minutes)

• etc.

To keep the time, I use the app MultiTimer, which allows me to track where I am in the process and know when to send each announcement.

I also have all the announcements written out in bulleted list in the slide notes so that I can cut and paste each announcement as I go. Because I cut instead of copy, I know exactly where I am in the announcements. In the example below, you can see what it would look like if I’d already sent the first three announcements and was waiting for the timer to tell me when to send the next.

Troubleshooting

This activity has been successful across many types of participant groups (students, professionals, members of the public), but it still has room for improvement.

First, it’s tricky if the groups do not evenly divide into threes. When I have co-host(s), I’ll assign them to a pair and ask that one of the pair goes twice (better to go twice than spend longer on the activity). When I don’t have co-hosts I’ll assign foursome(s) and ask one person in the group to take a pass.

Also, sometimes folks don’t quite get the rules or why they need to turn their camera off, etc. This may be helped by doing a brief demonstration of the conversation in front of everyone before they jump into breakout rooms (thanks to Nancy for this idea).

Additionally, the Zoom breakout room announcements are easy to miss and it may be better to close the rooms after 10 minutes, bring everyone back, and then open them back up, just so everyone gets their full time (thanks to Robin for this idea).

As I experiment with these alternatives, I’ll update this blog post with how my process evolves.

The Best Part

The best part of this activity is the warm smiles on the faces of people coming back into the main room when the 30-minutes are up. It seems to facilitate real connection in a virtual environment, and, based on reports from participants, is actually helping people. I definitely recommend it and invite you to share your experiences and modifications with me so I might learn from them as well!

The Comfort/Chaos Circle

A couple years ago, I discovered a model for thinking about learning that I call the Comfort/Chaos Circle. I don’t recall where I picked it up, but it was immediately useful in my interactions with students and practitioners and I have used it in nearly every learning community I’ve fostered in the time since. The model is simply three concentric circles, each charting a specific zone: comfort zone, learning zone, chaos zone.

In general, I want learners to be in the green, the “learning” zone, but that’s not always the case. Comfort zones can be places to rest and recover, to build courage, to notice and reflect. Depending on our relationship with chaos, that zone can be uniquely productive as well. Our circles can and do shift across seasons of our lives, days of the week, and even moment to moment. Whatever’s going on in the world affects our relationship to comfort and chaos, as does our personality and our personal histories.

I typically engage students in this model by asking them to draw their own Comfort/Chaos Circle. This is a great activity to get students to check with themselves and communicate where they are with me. It’s also fairly easy to draw and intuitive to do so.

But given our recently imposed virtual learning environments, I have found a new way to use the Comfort/Chaos Circle and it’s working really well. I draw three circles on Jamboard (or any tool that allows collaborative editing, drawing, and stickies) with enough space for folks to put stickies in each zone. Then, I ask everyone to create a sticky, color it however they like, and plot where they are in that moment.

In the span of a minute, I know so much more about where the group is: Jamie may need a nudge to stretch a little (or not, depends on how well I know Jamie). Lee has a toe in chaos, so I’ll need to keep an eye out for that. Robbie needs to be reeled in and Kelly is either putting a little levity in the exercise, doesn’t know how to use Jamboard, or needs a little one-on-one to see what’s going on.

In a large group, taking this sort of temperature check helps me re-assess my approach if there are a lot folks in comfort or learning. I like using Jamboard because it allows people to place their names on the line, which I’ve found is something people tend to do. (I’m sure other tools would do this as well, but it’s nice that the sticky goes “under” the line, so you can really gauge where they are.) Perhaps best of all, everyone in the group realizes where everyone else is and can contribute to the work of getting everyone nearer to the learning zone (including themselves).

I realize that online learning is creating a heap of work and considerable hurdles for many educators. This activity is a great way to get students using collaborative tools and paying attention to themselves and each other, one that’s actually a bit better online than in person. I hope it gives you insights into your students you wouldn’t have otherwise. And if you try it, please let me know how it goes, if it breaks, and/or how you’ve changed it to better meet your needs.

The Zen of Zooming

In 1973, Frederick Franck wrote The Zen of Seeing: Seeing/Drawing as meditation. It is a handwritten book that, as Franck cautions, “may be a little slower to read, but there is no hurry, for what I want to share with you took a long time to experience.” I discovered the book in 2012 as I was preparing for Project Feederwatch: Sketch, a 6-week collaboration with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Along with a phenomenal team of researchers, designers, and educators, I taught citizen scientists to draw the birds they were counting in their backyards.

The Feedersketch team in front of some of the drawings uploaded from our participants.

The project is a highlight in my career and for many reasons—the team, the participants, the focus on birding and drawing—but a detail I must credit in part is how my preparation for the project took place on a trip to Paudash Lake with my two dear friends, Chris and Charlotte.

Paudash Lake, Ontario

Chris’s grandfather won a small cabin, which sits on a tiny rock island in the middle of Paudash Lake, in a poker game long ago. Every summer, they go to the cabin for many weeks to restore and I was given the honor of being invited to spend time with them while they were there. It was such a lovely experience that I think of it regularly to this day and have in many the years since. While much of that loveliness has to do with Chris and Charlotte and our friendship, I do not hesitate to attribute some of it to the experience I had reading Franck’s book while I was there. 

Charlotte

Chris

To practice the Zen of Seeing, Franck asks you to sit and stare at an object intimately before beginning to draw it. Then, he asks you to draw it without looking away. That means you must draw without seeing what you’re drawing. The idea, in the long run, is that you transcend the self by truly seeing what you are drawing. Here’s how Franck describes the activity in his book (pp. XiV-XV). Notice how even the in-person version meets our present-day requirements to be socially distanced (!):

I distributed cheap sketchpads and pencils and transferred my workshop to the grounds of the college. I asked the participants to sit down somewhere on the lawn. “Anywhere, as long as you leave at least six feet of space between one another. Don’t talk, just sit and relax.

“Now, let your eyes fall on whatever happens to be in front of you. It may be a plant or a bush or a tree, or perhaps just some grass. Close your eyes for the next five minutes… 

“Now, open your eyes and focus on whatever you observed before — that plant or leaf or dandelion. Look it in the eye, until you feel it looking back at you. Feel that you are alone with it on Earth! That is the most important thing in the universe, that it contains all the riddles of life and death. It does!

You are no longer looking, you are SEEING.

“Now, take your pencil loosely in your hand, and while you keep your eyes focused allow the pencil to follow on the paper what the eye perceives. Feel as if with the point of your pencil you are caressing the contours, the whole circumference of that leaf, that sprig of grass. Just let your hand move! Don’t check what gets onto the paper, it does not matter at all! If your pencil runs off the paper, that’s fine too! You can always start again. Only don’t let your eye wander from what it is seeing, and don’t lift your pencil from your paper! And above all: don’t try too hard, don’t “think” about what you are drawing, just let the hand follow what the eye sees. Let it caress…”

With the limitations set forth by the pandemic, nearly all of our learning is happening virtually, and I am happy to say that the Zen of Seeing is an activity that not only transcends our spiritual realities, it also transcends the physical/virtual divide. I would even go so far as to say that the activity uniquely benefits from being online. Here’s how I do it.

Instructions

A recent Zen of Zooming sketch.

Step One: I ask everyone in the meeting to turn on their cameras and microphones so that we can see each other and share in a common soundscape. (I do make a disclaimer that those who don’t want to turn on videos or unmute for whatever reason are fine to remain unseen/unheard or some combination of the two.)

Step Two: I ask everyone to enter “gallery mode” so that videos of all participants are up at once. We scan the “room.” And then, like with Franck’s instruction, we allow our eyes fall on someone.

Step Three: We “pin” the video of the person we’re observing so it’s nice and big, and we sit in silence looking at them for about a minute.

Step Four: We start to draw. I give folks similar instruction as to Franck: “Don’t look down, start over if you want or need to.” I don’t use the word “caress” but I do say something like, “let your pen or pencil etch the contours of what you see onto the page.” We draw for about two or three minutes.

Step Five: I tell folks to stop drawing and ask everyone to look down to see what they did. There is always laughter, especially from those who have attempted to draw teeth. 

Step Six: I ask if anyone wants to share their drawing and inevitably a few brave souls will offer their page to the camera. We all pin the video while they describe their experience. 

Those dreaded teeth (that’s supposed to be me by the way).

The only people I’ve ever drawn like this, outside of a Zoom call (and even once on one), were of people that I know intimately and love. For the typical professional conference, classroom, or virtual training it would seem, perhaps, too much to expect that our participants open to each other enough to sit and stare and draw each other this way. But the Zoom interface miraculously shoulders the awkwardness of this activity. You can’t know who’s looking at you and whoever you’re looking can’t know it, either. No one can see what you’ve drawn unless you offer it up. The whole experience is publicly private.

I hesitate to imagine what Franck would think of this interpretation of his activity. I am sure he’d shame us into getting off our screens and into a meadow. But I'm also sure I would defend this in his presence because, in my experience, it is humanizing and intimate and real—all things our Zoom calls could use a lot more of.

Great Lengths: Setting Boundaries with Facebook

In December 2017, I “quit Facebook,” by which I mean I chose to deactivate my account. Many months later, I woke in the middle of the night thinking of someone I’d met in Newcastle Upon Tyne who had been very kind to me, but whose name I could not remember. I realized the only place I could go to find her name was Facebook. It was as if she lived “in Facebook” to me, the way people live in Durham, NC or Seattle. The idea (and clever portmanteau) of a “Facation”—a vacation to the “land” of Facebook—occurred to me and thus began my boundary-setting experiment with this technology. 

I made plans to visit Facebook like I would visit Durham, NC, where I used to live. I thought of all the people I’d want see and catch up with while I was there. I thought about all the things I’d want to tell them about my life. I envisioned us sharing an asynchronous cup of coffee across time and space, remembering and reveling in each other. 

As I would with any vacation, I bounded my Facation to a set number of days (a week), set a date (the last week of the year) and I made a plan. At the end of 2018, I reactivated my account and made my first post. I told everyone I’d be there for a week and couldn’t wait to catch up. Each day, I went through sections of my friends list and clicked on the pages of people I wanted to check in with. I wrote a single, lengthy, picture-filled post each day about my life. Dozens of people chimed in on the comments with their encouragements, commiserations, and own updates. I maintained several chatty back-and-forth conversations through private messages. A week later, I said my goodbyes and see-you-next-years and deactivated again, re-entering the blissful world of (effectively) not having a Facebook account. A year later, I repeated my Facation and it was just as life-giving, connecting, and worthwhile.  

I imagine a future where we collectively plan annual “digital reunions,” gathering as one big group in some digital locale where everyone invests in creating thoughtful, robust, and connective content. Until then, I’ll continue to hold this complicated and fraught technology at arms length—distancing myself from the platform while doing my best to avoid distancing myself from those I hold dear that live upon it.

Great Lengths: A Blog Series About Setting Boundaries with Social Media

There’s an entire industry built around harvesting our attention for corporate financial gain. It’s called the attention economy. The more attention we pay to a website, game, video, or app, the more advertising and data-tracking those media can do. To keep us coming back, tech companies deploy a method called behavior design (it’s also been called persuasive technology and captology). Using lessons learned from early psychological investigations, such as BF Skinner’s pigeons pressing levers for food, modern day psychologists have created a formula to get humans to press buttons for likes. This formula uses pain and pleasure, our hopes and fears, and the promise of social acceptance and threat of rejection to motivate our behavior. 

Increasingly, designers and programmers are building addictive technology that causes and/or regulates the release of dopamine in our brains. Some apps and websites actually “dose” dopamine by withholding information, like how many likes a photo has on Instagram, so it can burst that information later and all at once, effectively dosing a larger “hit” of dopamine and making it more likely that we’ll to return sooner for another. 

This is one reason why it is a common experience to lose time while on Facebook or Instagram or Youtube. The consequences of this lost time aren’t confined to what we might have done instead—our attention is impacted as well. This is because attention is fatiguable, and when we spend it scrolling endless streams and auto-playing content, we have less energy to attend to things that may matter more.

I believe we can have greater agency over how and when we attend to technology. As a PhD student, this belief motivates much of my research. Over the course of the next month, I intend to write a series of blog posts that describe the strategies I use to set boundaries in my use of technology.  With these posts, I hope to generate and lively and convivial dialogue about mitigating (or at least minimizing) the harms of the attention economy while allowing for (or even maximizing) the positive effects technology can have in our lives. Stay tuned.

Community Building in the Classroom

“This is the first course I have ever taken that encouraged students to engage with each other on a very human level. This allows for much deeper connections to be made, and I was surprised at how quickly my peers began to feel more like friends.”

— Informatics Undergraduate

I have begun to begin and end my quarter with an Impromptu Networking activity to foster connection between students. It’s a low-stakes way to get folks meeting each other quickly, and it’s easy to take those 1:1 conversations and share them group-wide. Based on reflections from students, which are peppered throughout this post, it seems to have a powerful effect on how they see each other, and how they see themselves.

The Setup

First, I ask folks to stand up, if they’re able. This immediately infuses the space with energy. Then, I explain the rules.

1. Find a person to chat with. Raise your hand if you haven’t found someone so you can easily find someone without a partner.

2. When I say “begin,” one person in the pair should begin answering the question on the board (see below).

3. When I ring the bell once, switch so the other person in the pair shares their answer. (I use a bell because my voice doesn’t carry well in a loud room. If I don’t have a bell, I’ll knock an Expo marker against a whiteboard for the same effect.)

4. When I ring the bell twice, everyone look at me. (When I have everyone’s attention, I tell them to find a new partner.)

5. Repeat. (I go three rounds.)

For my class, we focus on designing restorative experiences for undergraduates, so the first conversation I want to seed is a conversation about why undergraduates need to be restored in the first place. I ask students to discuss their reactions to the following prompt, which I display on the class projector: “What, if anything, do you find stressful in your life and how do you cope?”

“I think through these deeply personal and vulnerable conversations about what we are going through (eg. stress) we can learn a lot from each other and grow closer to one another. ”

— Informatics Undergraduate

Mapping the Conversation

This activity generates a lot of energy. As a facilitator, you can transfer that energy into the next activity. It may seem scary, especially if you don’t feel confident with your handwriting or spelling, but I encourage you to take the question you’ve just asked the room, and chart out the answers on a whiteboard where the conversation can be visualized. This map becomes a way to generate more conversation and creates a co-created artifact of their one-on-one conversations. For example, for the prompt above, I drew two circles on the whiteboard and wrote “STRESS” in one and “COPING” in the other. I then asked students, “So, what’do you find stressful?” and started mapping out their answers. When the contributions began to slow, I asked, “What are we missing?” When that tapped out, I said, “Okay, so what sort of things do you do to cope?” and we started mapping that.

“As a student, sometimes I’ll have felt loneliness as I feel I’m the only one struggling while everyone’s a step forward. During the first week of class, I remembered when the class listed down what made them stressed as college students. I remember listening to my peers and I was surprised to resonate with their experiences and feelings.”

— Informatics Undergraduate

Scaffolding Conversations

Stress is a pretty easy thing to connect to and talk about for undergraduates, so I asked students to discuss that with each other without too much scaffolding. However some topics benefit from a solo activity beforehand. I do this in the hopes that the activity will enable them to approach each other with more confidence. This is, I suspect, a way to ensure more authenticity, for they aren’t approaching each other with as much fear.

For example, in the last class of the quarter, we had another series of conversations, but this time we discussed gratitude instead of stress. We’d been focusing on what’s wrong in the university all quarter, but there are many things right about it at the same time. Focusing on gratitude ends the class on an upbeat, generating positive (but complicated) feelings towards the system we’re a part of, and towards each other.

Since feeling and expressing gratitude can be a bit scary, I asked individuals to create a gratitude map before they talked with each other. Everyone grabbed an 11x17 piece of paper and a couple of Sharpies (red and black) and then drew a circle in the middle and labeled it UW. They then were asked to draw five spokes from the center: who, what, when, where, why.

I gave folks time to fill out the map and then they took the map with them to each round of conversation, which asked them to discuss, “Where does your gratitude reside within the system? What do you feel most connected to in this moment?” From those three rounds of conversation, we immediately transitioned into mapping the one-on-ones as a larger group, just as before.

“I have learned to be more open, not afraid of being myself in a classroom setting. ”

— Informatics Undergraduate

Trusting students into speech

Throughout this post, I have pasted quotes from my students’ reflections on how these conversations affect them. It’s these quotes that encourage me to keep creating opportunities for students to be real with each other. I want to also acknowledge that it can feel scary to ask a room that may or may not trust you yet to do something that requires vulnerability. We have probably all been witness to someone we didn’t trust trying to draw out of us what we weren’t willing to give. But be careful to not let those old experiences stop you. The way through is to trust that students are up for the task of being a “more open, not afraid” version of themselves. They can sense that I truly value and eagerly anticipate what they’re going to say (and I do!). While invisible, this perceivable quality of my intention infuses the room with trust. Students speak into that.

Creating a Post-it Note Themed Brainstorming Space in Tinderbox

Sometimes when I’m using Tinderbox, I want the experience and aesthetics of working with Post-it notes on a large blank wall. This morning, as I was brainstorming some end-of-the-year OKRs, I figured out how to create such a space without the extra clicking that Prototypes or Stamps require. The above video takes you through the steps I took to assign OnAdd rules to a container where all notes created (or pasted) into it look Post-it-note-ish.

To make these notes, I typed ⌘1 for “Inspector”, clicked the “Gear” icon on far right, selected the “Action” tab, pasted the following code, and hit ↵: $Color = "cooler poppy"; $Width = 6; $Height = 6; $Shadow = true; $ShadowDistance = 10; $ShadowBlur = 20; $ShadowColor = "lightest black"; $NameAlignment = "center"; $NameFont = "SketchnoteSquare";

Noticing

On rainy day in March 2015, I walked outside of my apartment in Capitol Hill and noticed the heart pictured above on the sidewalk. This wasn’t a terribly groundbreaking moment. Having worked for science museums, I’d been trying to slow down and notice the world around me for some time. But, for some reason, I decided to snap a photo of it and posted it to Instagram with a hashtag I made up on the spot, #seattleloves. I felt something positive in noticing that heart. I associated it with the idea that I belonged in Seattle, having only arrived a few days before. For several months after, I posted dozens of pictures of hearts. A patch of bare dirt, a cloud, a broken hazelnut shell, graffitti. I began to notice hearts everywhere.

I documented each photo dutifully with #seattleloves until my relationship with Instagram got “complicated” and I removed the app to regain some of my attention. By that point, though, the practice of noticing hearts was a habit. I continued to notice them, and still snapped photos occasionally. Four years passed. Noticing a heart had become an experience of orientation, like a signpost on a trail telling me I was on the right path.

Then, a few months ago, when I had some extra time and it was a lovely day, I decided to walk from the ferry terminal downtown to the university. I chose to walk over Capitol Hill and I found myself a few blocks away from where my practice began. I noticed a heart. This one:

At that moment, on that day, with that heart, I realized these hearts weren’t signposts so much as reminders that I everywhere I am is the right place.

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A Contemplative Practice

When I tell people that I research contemplative practice, they more often than not reply, “What do you mean by contemplative practice?” Much of what I mean can be illustrated by this example of noticing hearts. But before I can speak to that, I should center us on at least one understanding of the word contemplation.

Contemplation is a moment of presence to life. It can have mundane and/or extraordinary consequences (extraordinarily joyful or painful) or someplace in between. It does not require practice, in fact, we all experience contemplation from time to time. As Mary Frohlich, a Religious of Sacred Heart and professor, describes it:

We can define contemplative experience as awareness—whether fleeting or habitual—of that most foundational, most original depth of being. … Because this is our most foundational reality, contemplative experience is potentially available to every human being, at all times and in every circumstance. It can and does “happen” to people without any preparation and while they are engaged in pursuits that are not concerned with seeking it.

In my noticing hearts example, contemplation occurred in the moment of truth I experienced when I noticed the green graffitied heart on the sidewalk. Contemplative practice, the four years worth of hearts I noticed prior to that moment, readied me for that moment. It also made that moment available to me because I was attuned to the act of noticing instead of being caught up in my thoughts of the future or past (which is almost certainly where I’d be otherwise).

The practice cultivated a purposeful curiosity—a habitual preoccupation with the mysterious unfolding of my own life—that resonated deep within me. The realization that “everywhere I am is the right place” changes my perspective and behavior (when I can remember it), and invites me to accept what life gives and to have compassion for myself and others when what life gives is particularly challenging. I’ve found (and still find) the practice to be delightfully rewarding, life giving, and of deep comfort.

I also realize the truths this practice holds for me are still unfolding. I do not know what I might take from noticing hearts in the years to come. That, too, I hold with curiosity and commitment.

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An Invitation to Practice

In the Design Methods class I’m teaching this fall, I will be inviting my students to establish their own noticing practice. This is, in part, to help them become better designers. But it’s also, in part, to invite them to explore the mysteries in their own life with a similar purposeful curiosity. After mentioning the assignment to a colleague, who then began to notice hearts herself, I decided to share this blog post and invite anyone to engage in the practice. Here is the Google Slides template if you would like to use that on your own, or in your classroom.

I should also say that don’t have to notice hearts, of course. Any shape, object, or concept that regularly hides in plain sight will do. For prior students hearts, circles, feathers, specific colors (or gradients of color), or concepts like pareidolia have worked well. My advice is to pick what resonates most for you, and adjust if you never see it, or it doesn’t delight you when you do.

Google Slides as a Pedagogical Tool

This summer, I found Google Slides a remarkably effective tool in the classroom and want to share a few of the ways I’m using it to support student work. Before I share these use cases, I’d like to thank and credit Ahmer Arif for the idea of using templated Google Slides documents as collaborative student assignments in the first place, and my advisor, David Levy, for his guidance and collaboration in prototyping templates for a different class. Thanks, Ahmer and David!

Use No. 1: Homework Assignment

In the undergraduate design methods course I’m teaching, I have a series of assignments called “Process Books.” Each assignment is a Google Slides document resized to a standard 8.5x11 sheet of paper. The slide deck has a cover page, a template, and an example (as seen above). Students copy the template and fill it out in a single, shared Google Slides document. For our class, we were co-designing a map of restorative spaces on campus, so this assignment asked students to find examples of maps, give them context, and provide commentary—something they liked about it (in green), a question they had about it (in blue) and a concern (in yellow). When the assignment was done, we had over 40 example maps we could use to inform our collective project.

Another example of an assignment like this was asking students to (1) find and share links to articles that supported or challenged the assumptions we were making about our research; and (2) find examples of technologies that already addressed our problem space. These articles and examples gave us rich and plentiful analogous research to consider as we brainstormed interventions.

Use No. 2: Peer Validation and Critique

Another way to use Google Slides in an assignment like the one listed above is to have students go to the document in class and provide peer feedback to each other through the commenting feature. In the case below, I gave students time in class to visit at least two slides and to (1) say something validating to the student about their work; and (2) to look at the slide through a critical lens and comment on specific things we may want to replicate or avoid in our own map. Each slide ended up with several comments and students got to exercise validating each other and also being critical about design.

Use No. 3: VIRTUAL Dot Voting

In a different assignment, students grouped up in class and created visions of our university in 5-10 years. The visioning work was inspired by Zingerman’s Zingtrain Visioning exercises and students were asked to imagine our university as a less stressful, more restorative place. They used text, images, sketches, and video (all easy to create and embed on the fly in Google Slides) to create their slides. Then, the class reviewed the slides of other teams and each student was told to copy a blue dot I provided on the instructions slide and paste it three times to vote on different parts of the vision that most excited them (see below). In a matter of minutes, we could see certain ideas bubble to the top and discuss them as a class.

Use No. 4: Slide as Art Board

It is reasonable to think of a Google Slides document as a slide to be projected in a presentation. This use makes anything that is not on the slide itself irrelevant, like the notes and the gray space beyond the borders of the slide itself. But in our case, these are valuable regions of information and exploration. For example, I began to use the gray space surrounding the slide as a place for communication to the students: checklists, examples, hints, and reminders.

Use No. 5: Slide Notes for Reflections

The slide notes area is a great space for instructions as well as a place to ask students to reflect on their learning. For example, in this empathy mapping assignment, which was inspired by OF/BY/FOR ALL’s Partner Power Meetings, the slide notes for the template slide were as follows:

Instructions: (1) Create a slide and enter the interviewee’s pseudonym and description. (2) List the challenges, values, goals, behaviors, and restoration as requested in each section. (3) Adjust the spacing and font size so that the final page looks considered and intentional. (4) Replace these instructions with a brief reflection (2-5 sentences) on what the experience of the interview and empathetic listening was like. What did you learn that you didn’t already know? What was challenging? Was there anything you felt you were particularly good at?

These reflections ended up being a great addition to the assignment and the students always seemed to have valuable things to share, as you’ll see the example below. This worked so well, I’ll likely incorporate this into all assignments moving forward.

Use No. 6: Collaborative Slides

For all of the use cases mentioned so far, either a student or a group of students has worked on a slide together, but we also invited several students or groups of students to collectively contribute to a single slide. For example, when students did field observations of various restorative sites on campus, they categorized their sites across a variety of features, like the presence of trees or water, and they mapped them on matrices, like how loud or crowded a space was (as seen below). Some collaborative slides simply asked the students a question and they added their answer in a bulleted list (with a comment or a parenthetical team number to identify their work). As with many of the assignments, these slides became resources for the entire class to use.

Some last words…

When used these ways, I found Google Slides to be a tremendous asset to the classroom. Students could see each other’s work and also interact with each other. I found grading their slides enjoyable and it was easy to simply download a PDF of the file at the time the assignment was due. Since one of my policies is that any assignment can be revised and resubmitted, it was also easy for the student to continue to work on their slide and notify me for regrading. As I continue my use of Google Slides as a pedagogical tool, I will add new use cases and further describe what I learn. If you decide to experiment with it, please let me know how it works for you and the new ways you discover to use it!

download templates

In the time since this posting, some readers have requested access to the templates I use and so I have made copies available here:

• Empathy Maps

• Go Alongs

• Field Observations

• Maps

• Analogous Research

• Visioning

Mapping Areas of Possibility

This post is inspired by the ongoing thought experiment: What if task management software was designed to help us be our truest selves instead of helping us be as productive as possible? I’ve previously shared two strategies: “Be a Good…” lists and crafting tasks as messages of kindness from past to present self. Today, I would like to share a method for reorganizing projects and tasks to better align with the life we want to live.

Please note: This method applies to any software that invites the user to organize her tasks into projects and folders. I’m using OmniFocus for this, but the process would work in many popular apps. As for handwritten lists, it may be a little less appropriate, but it would work if you are creating collections in the Bullet Journal style.

Areas of Responsibility

A popular method for figuring out task management structure is to map areas of responsibility. In the Getting Things Done methodology, David Allen suggests that you create “a complete inventory of everything you hold important and are committed to.” He goes on to suggest moving down each area and creating “reminders of key areas of responsibility, your staff, your values, and so on.” The lists below are examples from his book about what a complete inventory and drilling down into a key area might look like:

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key areas

Career goals:

• Team morale

• Processes

• Timelines

• Staff issues

• Workload

• Communication

Complete Inventory

• Career goals

• Service

• Family

• Relationships

• Community

• Health and energy

• Financial resources

• Creative expression

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These lists can inform how tasks and projects are organized. Given the above example, it is natural to create project folders and contexts that align with those areas. If I follow this advice and create a map of my own areas of responsibility, it looks like this:

Using these areas, I might create a project for my design methods class this summer under teaching, and put the map of restorative space I’m designing under research. My role as an Of/By/For All board member might go under global service. An acupuncture visit could go under health. This framing accommodates pretty much anything I can think to do and much of the software that I’ve explored fits well within it.

Areas of Possibility

Consider, however, what happens when we decide to map areas of possibility instead. Instead of creating an inventory of all the areas of my life, I create areas of possibility by asking myself what life I want to live into. I move from an “inventory” mindset to an inherently creative activity. I must imagine what my life could become. Heres what I get when I map areas of possibility:

These areas reflect a combination of factors that are significant to me right now. Some are heavy on my heart and mind (like good health and spirituality), others are exciting and energizing (like creating a life of writing and teaching), and others are more oriented toward the contemplative (like appreciating the miracle of being in alive still and in the first place). To create this list, I imagined my future self, looked at the quality of her life, and described it with these sentences. It is important to note, however, that those imaginings were informed by a steady observation of my life as it is today and what it reveals about who I am becoming. In other words, mapping areas of possibility is observational, not aspirational.

In Let Your Life Speak, Parker Palmer writes, “Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am.” The areas I’ve mapped above were created in that spirit. For example, the area labeled “my everyday working life feels like the general exam” was inspired by reflecting on how right it felt to write eight hours a day everyday for two weeks during my general exam—how wholly satisfied I felt at the end of each day, even the hard ones, and how easy it was to re-engage each morning. Noticing that about myself revealed a possibility to live into a life that may be particularly right for me. The area labeled “I appreciate how precious human life really is” was in response to the contemplative practices I’ve held for years and the chief lesson they’ve taught me, which is, in Mary Oliver’s words, “doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?” It is inspired by small moments, like when I look across the room at my wife as she does yoga and appreciate that her life is limited and one day I will not be able to do something so casual and fleeting and wish that I could.

In mapping responsibilities, Allen drills down into each area to explore its key features. Doing this in a map of possibilities might look like:

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I appreciate how precious human life really is:

• I stay present to life as it unfolds.

• I appreciate those around me, realizing I will lose them.

My everyday working life feels like the general exam:

• I cook all my meals.

• I take daily walks or ride on my bike for fun.

• I write for hours each day.

• I exercise my mind and thoughts to their limit.

• I approach answers to big, complex questions.

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Considering the two lists above, writing this blog post might fit under a project folder called “The Writing Life,” which would support me in “writing for hours each day.” Preparing for a visit from a friend might fit under a project called “Life is Precious,” which would support me in “appreciating those around me, realizing I will lose them.”

Translating Map Into Structure

For a long time, I organized my tasks into a folder structure that reflected areas of responsibility (left), but now I’m organizing based on areas of possibility (right). The magic of this organizational tweak is that now certain projects feel like they don’t belong and I have to reckon with that, including reconsidering them altogether.

Areas of Responsibility:

Areas of Possibility:

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My areas of possibility have become folders in OmniFocus: “I am in good health,” and “I feel at peace with my spirit” have turned into a folder “Healing Happens”; “My everyday working life feels like the general exam,” has turned into “The Writing Life”; “I am in relationship with others as a teacher” has turned into “The Courage to Teach” (a nod to Parker Palmer’s sage advice about teaching); and “I appreciate how precious human life really is,” has led to two folders, “Life is Precious” (present-oriented) and “For and With” (care-oriented). It has also changed the way I organize my tags. For example, my “Agendas” tag used to be full of people organized by area of responsibility. Now I am reminded of how I want to engage with people. For example, Marilyn is now under “Cherish” and Chickens are now under “Care.”

Areas of Responsibility:

Areas of Possibility:

Organizing my folders this way helps OmniFocus serve as an ally in me becoming my truest self. While I’d never put a task, “Look at Marilyn” under a project “Appreciate my Wife” in my folder “Life is Precious” and check it off when it’s done, the structure of my projects now serves as a reminder that the work I do each day, ticking off this box or that box, is my life. By being thoughtful about how I use this technology, I can make the life I want to live available to me right now by changing the content of those boxes.

Kinder To Do Lists

As a person who loves to cook, I look at my pantry as a place of possibility. I see beans and cornmeal, cocoa powder and almonds, pasta and capers and I want to create—to cook. I was thinking recently, what if my pantry were like my to do list? Instead of being a place of potential, it would be a list of things I need to do, many combined with others in ways that don’t make sense.

I began to wonder… how might I organize my to do list so that it makes me feel the way I do when I look at my pantry? How might it become a place that gives me a sense possibility, where I want to create—to work. I’ve been playing with this idea for a couple months and have come to some preliminary conclusions.

(1) LANGUAGE MATTERS

For those of us that use digital tools to manage our to do lists, it is especially important to consider how we use language in creating to do items. When items start with verbs (e.g. Use, Soak, Cook, Combine, Check, Cook, Eat), they become commands. This results in computers commanding us to do things. They control our time and our agency in subtle (and sometimes overt) ways.

I’ve begun to use new language when I enter items into my to do list (in my case this is OmniFocus, but these suggestions would work with most software, I imagine, and also with handwritten lists). In the example below, I’ve shifted the language of each item in a sample list:

When checking off an item that begins with “You promised to email Maria…” I feel as though I’m being a person who follows up on her promises. When checking off “Email Maria,” I feel as though I’ve just won another round of whack-a-mole. It used to be the case that I often felt disappointed in myself at the end of the day, despite the work I’d done. Now I actually feel better and I wonder if it is the new language I’m using. Checking off items now adds up to something more than winning whack-a-mole. It has become evidence that I am fulfilling promises, following up on good ideas, remembering my intentions—much more rewarding to me than “being productive.”

(2) FUTURE-Self compassion

Right now I am mostly treating OmniFocus as an external memory for my intentions. I try to craft my to do items so they remind me of who I wanted to be. I also try to give my future self agency to decide to do something different. A lot of my items begin with “You wanted…” or “You thought…” or “Consider…” so that I can decide what to do when I want to do something. Let’s take a real list as an example. In my old way of creating a list of things to read, each item would contain the name of the article and I’d check it off once I’d read it. Now, my reading list looks like this:

(3) A practice of kindness

While it’s much quicker to rattle off commands in a to do list, I’ve experienced a couple of interesting benefits crafting them this way. First, it gives me a chance to practice kindness every time I need to add an item to my to do list. Like centering on the breath to self-regulate attention, having something “to do” centers me on self-compassion over and over again. In turn, I become the recipient of kindness (from my past self to my present self) every time I look at my to do list. This provides a chance to experience gratitude and gives the gift of choosing what to do with my time.

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I’m not at the point where opening OmniFocus brings as much excitement and possibility as looking at my pantry… perhaps I love cooking more than working and so it never will. However, I open the app with curiosity about what it is I thought I might like to do, which is such a different experience from feeling overwhelmed by all the things that need to be done.

Prettier Tinderbox Maps

I’ve created a couple videos recently that demonstrate some techniques I use to make my Tinderbox maps a bit more aesthetically pleasing. It’s important to note that 1) as a designer; and 2) as someone who is encouraged to make more maps when my maps look nice, I value these tricks, perhaps, a bit too much. This is because some of them compromise the integrity of the data between linkages. This is shameful! (I know!) But alas I remain a bit shameless about it because I’m making maps that make me happy and the maps help me learn, so two wins, one loss… I’ll take it. Here they are:

Some example maps (click to expand)

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Some Reflections on Slow Technology

A few years ago, the meditation app I used was outmoded by an iOS update and the following warning appeared every time I used it.

Most of the technology we use helps us do things better and faster. A car gets us where we're going with freedom and speed. A microwave cooks food in minutes, where if we used a stove or, even slower, an open fire, it could take hours. An email sends a message in seconds. If we were to put that message in the mail instead, we'd wait days for it to arrive. If we carried it by hand, or even on a pony like they used to, it could take a very very long time.

But valuing faster and better above all else creates a way of life that can miss out on life itself. For example, think of all the things you speed past in a car on your way somewhere. Or, think of all the things you might see and learn and do if you walked instead. Think of the learning that happens when you burn something you've cooked, or the primal and empowering experience of building a fire. Think of how differently you’d write an email if it took massive effort to get it to someone. Technology, which was born out of industry, war, and office environments, rightly prizes efficiency and function, but somehow we haven't fully integrated the fact that we live significant parts of our lives in homes and backyards, families and friendships.

A concept I've been reading about lately, slow technology, challenges these values and asks the question, what if we designed technology for the experiences we have while using it? What might change if we reconsidered the idea that everything needs to get done as quickly as possible? Lars Hallnäs, a well known researcher of slow technology, has a popular paper he wrote with Johan Redström called Slow Technology — Designing for Reflection. There's also paper that's barely been cited that I really like, On the Philosophy of Slow Technology. I’ve recently read both (plus a few others) and I'd like to use this post to share what I currently understand about slow technology — both as an exercise in my own learning and also to serve as a reference in the future when I discuss the concept in panels and presentations. Prepare to dive into some specifics here, but trust me to not be overly academic about it.

There are three concepts I think are important to understand when it comes to slow tech:

1. Slow tech is not developed, it is enveloped.

2. Slow tech values different things than we're used to.

3. Slow tech may be beneficially frustrating.

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DEVELOPMENT vs. ENVELOPMENT

When technology is developed, it is solution-oriented.

We have a problem:

getting from here to there

feeding ourselves

communicating w/someone far away

Technology solves it:

with a car

with a microwave

with an email

But when technology is enveloped, it is experience-oriented. We consider things beyond what it would take to send a message, feed ourselves, or get us here from there as quickly as possible. Instead of saving every bit of time we can, we intentionally fill it with playful, reflective, or profound experiences enabled by technology. With slow technology, we can ask how the experience of using technology enhances our lives. It's not what the technology does, it’s who, how, and what we are while doing things with it.

VALUES

When technology is enveloped, it's like we draw a big circle around our use of it and everything in that circle becomes alive and worthy. Hallnäs points out that normally, we don't value anything inside the circle if it's not efficient or functional, but he suggests that there are all sorts of valuable things inside. For example:

• We might value understanding how the technology works and why it does what it does.

• We might value how the technology inspires or requires us to reflect on it (or ourselves).

• We might value being thoughtful about how we apply or use the technology.

• We might value increasing our awareness of the consequences of technology.

• We might value craft — our masterful and artful use of a technology.

When we value things like reflection or craft — when efficiency or ease of use is not our number one value — we design technology differently. In fact, we might design it to be purposefully difficult or mysterious. Why would we do this? Because the experience of being human is not a race to the end of our lives. We might consider designing technology and tools so that the use of them gives us meaning along the way.

BENEFICIALLY FRUSTRATING

Another well known researcher of slow technology is Will Odom. He wrote a paper about design called, Designing for Slowness, Anticipation and Re-visitation: A Long Term Field Study of the Photobox that explores what we do when we encounter and live with a slow technology.

The Photobox is a wooden box that sits in a prominent space in a home and every once in a while, it quietly prints a photo from the digital photo archive of the people who live there. They open the lid, look for a photo, and usually don't find one, but every once in a while (four or five times a month), they do.

Odom studied how folks experienced having the Photobox in their homes for over a year and he found that at first people were excited and eager to use the Photobox, but they soon became frustrated because of how slow and recalcitrant it was. This frustration lasted up to six months for some. Eventually, though, all households (admittedly there were only three), arrived at a place of acceptance and appreciation of the Photobox and its slow and random ways.

Perhaps more importantly than feelings like excitement, disappointment, frustration, and acceptance, were the lived experiences that accompanied them. First, users had to be with their emotions. Short of chucking the Photobox out a window, their impatience had no recourse with the machine. And when new photos arrived, some were surprised by images they'd long wished to forget and they had to experience that. One user began to put the photos under her pillow, another couple put them on their fridge. The device gave presence and potency to photos of a former life lived, enabling thoughtfulness and reflection — all arguably good things that may never have been possible with a “fast” approach.

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THIS APP MAY SLOW DOWN YOUR IPHONE

While I tend to be cynical about technology doing much good in a marketplace that ruthlessly vies for our attention and manipulates our behaviors and attitudes (more on this joyful topic, soon!), the idea of slow technology is inspiring to me. It makes me wonder what it would be like to have technology on my side instead of constantly wrestling with it to achieve my goals of being self-aware, loving, and present to my life while living it.

The following papers might be fun to dig into if you’re the sort to do such things…

Hallnäs, L. (2015). On the Philosophy of Slow Technology. Acta Universitatis Sapientiae-Social Analysis, 5(1). Retrieved from http://www.acta.sapientia.ro/acta-social/C5-1/social51-03.pdf

Hallnäs, L., & Redström, J. (2001). Slow technology--designing for reflection. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 5(3), 201–212.

Odom, W. T., et al. (2014). Designing for Slowness, Anticipation and Re-visitation: A Long Term Field Study of the Photobox. In Proceedings of the 32Nd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1961–1970). New York, NY, USA: ACM.

Turning Reading Notes into a Tinderbox Map

A reader emailed me this morning and wrote:

I've been in two minds about getting Tinderbox for some time due to the steep perceived learning curve. Your videos helped a lot.

What you didn't show was your process for getting information/ideas into TBX, and then creating the relevant reference links to other notes, etc. Would love to see another series on that :) {hint hint}"

And so, in the same rambling and rough-cut way I created my original Zettelkasten & Tinderbox videos, I created this four-part series. Part three is the worst — my apologies — but also, blame André. ☝️

A few notes before we begin:

• Y’all. This is very boring.

• I don’t think it matters so much how I map the information, but rather that I map it. For example, a few days ago, I was recalling the three types of triggers in BJ Fogg’s model for persuasive technology design and I did so by mentally traversing the map. The spatial layout created in Tinderbox helped me remember that those three triggers are: “sparks,” “facilitators,” and “signals.” See? I just did it again!

• I think it is exceptionally important to just start mapping, you can always edit later.

• This is so 100% me and my own way. I hope sharing it enables you to find you and your own way.

.Nearly an hour to waste awaits. Please, do at least watch it at double speed.

Some Ideas About How Environments are Restorative

Lately I’ve been reading about what makes environments restorative — those secret spots we go to feel whole, or grounded, or to be reminded of who we really are and what it’s really all about. What is it about those places? And are they only places? Or are they also the things we do when we’re in them?

There’s a good bit of literature out there already and I’m only scratching the surface of it at this point. However, I’ve scratched down enough to articulate some distinctions between the ideas people have and so I thought I’d write them up in an effort to share what I’m learning and also to watch how my understanding of these concepts evolves over time.

Attention Restoration Theory (ART) is an idea by Rachel and Stephen Kaplan, and I’ve blogged about it before. In ART, your attention is depleted by the demands of an environment and to restore it, you must get into an environment that has certain very specific features or conditions. It must feel like you’re 1) getting away, 2) that where you’re going is explorable and structured enough without feeling overwhelming or unsafe, 3) that what you want to do while you’re there is socially and physically possible, and 4) that it holds your attention without depleting it. This last quality, called fascination, is the magic of ART. It’s where the restoring bit happens.

Stress Recovery Theory (SRT) is an idea by Roger Ulrich. In SRT, one experiences stress and seeks out a restorative environment to recover. Nature, in particular water and vegetation, are especially restorative because from an evolutionary perspective, we perceive them as a resource rich (we will be more likely to survive near water and vegetation so it calms us). SRT is highly dependent on visual perception, and is a theory that relies on emotion: when we enter an environment, our bodies (and hearts) respond first, then our brains. We may cycle through memories and think about a space once we’ve had that initial emotional response, but the emotions are primary, and if we feel preference or aversion, those instincts will lead our way. In SRT, certain qualities of an environment are likely to cause us to calm down. The aforementioned water and vegetation are two (he calls these “natural features”), but there are others such as complexity, structure, depth and ground surfaces. These words have special meanings that I may blog about later, but essentially they all result in the perception that an environment is non-threatening, lacks tension, and is interesting.

And last, there’s Information Processing Fluency Theory (IPFT — sounds like a Myers Briggs score). This is a theory by, as best I can tell, Yannick Joye. I’m just digging into it and it’s far less cited or popular (and far newer) than the other theories, but here’s what I perceive the idea to be. Joye thinks we are not restored by nature, per-say, but by environments that are easy to process. This agrees and disagrees with parts of ART and SRT. For example, both theories suggest this concept in their own ways (“fascination” in ART is close, so is “complexity” in SRT), but neither theory relies on it the way IPFT does. Joye thinks nature’s restorative because it’s easy to process and he thinks it is easy to process because there is much “self-similarity” thanks to how fractal-based nature is. (I’ve got to admit that’s kind of clever.) What this does for restorative environments is that it opens up what’s eligible. Now, we can look at built environments as naturally restorative if we are (for a whole hosts of reasons, I’d imagine) highly fluent in processing the information within them.

So there. That’s what I’ve got today. I’ve a ton of reading and thinking still to do about all this, but how very interesting it is to explore these ideas and see how they respond to 1) contemplative space (as opposed to restorative space) and 2) pervasive and persuasive technologies that abound in nearly every space we go. More! Soon!

If you want to dig in more, might want to give these papers a read:

Kaplan, S. (1995). The restorative benefits of nature: Toward an integrative framework. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 15(3), 169–182.

Ulrich, R. S. (1983). Aesthetic and Affective Response to Natural Environment. In I. Altman & J. F. Wohlwill (Eds.), Behavior and the Natural Environment (pp. 85–125). Boston, MA: Springer US.

Joye, Y., & van den Berg, A. (2011). Is love for green in our genes? A critical analysis of evolutionary assumptions in restorative environments research. Urban Forestry & Urban Greening, 10(4), 261–268.

Using Zettelkasten and Tinderbox to Document a Literature Review

As a designer, I developed a design process that I trusted in times when I was thrown a gnarly problem and wasn’t sure how to solve it. Trusting in my process gave me something to do toward a solution. It was working the process, never some brilliant stroke of insight, that got me through to a place of originality and creativity.

As a scholar, I must develop an academic process that I can trust for the gnarly problems I’m thrown (or more likely, that I create for myself). To develop this process, I have sought to understand how others discover articles, read them, take notes about them, reference those notes, and write something original and creative as a result.

I have realized lately that a process is emerging. I am trusting it and it seems to be working. In reciprocity for all those who have shared their processes for me to discover, I have decided to share a bit of my own. Warning: this is very rough. I sat down and recorded four parts over the course of an afternoon. There’s no editing, no retakes, just me talking through what I’m doing right now. It’s highly boring and at the same time, I’ve sat and watched many similar videos as I was trying to find my own path and found them invaluable.

The tools I mention in these videos are:

• my iPad Pro and the app GoodNotes for a reading environment,

• my Bullet Journal as a place for temporary note-taking following the rule “read with a pen in hand,” which I learned from this book, and

• Tinderbox as the software supporting the Zettelkasten method of note-taking

Nearly 45 minutes of walkthrough follows in the following four Youtube videos… enjoy?

Restorative Environments

To create a map of restorative space on UW's campus, I’ve been researching what makes space restorative and I've come across the following framework from the Rachel and Stephen Kaplan. Big caveat before reading: Work in progress alert. I am constantly learning and reshaping my understanding of these concepts.

Rachel Kaplan is a professor emeritus at the University of Michigan. Stephen Kaplan, also a professor emeritus at UM, passed away this summer. Together and individually, they’ve authored many seminal works exploring how and why access to nature matters to human health and well-being.

Researchers Stephen and Rachel Kaplan, Photo Credit: University of Michigan

Kaplan, S. (1995). The restorative benefits of nature: Toward an integrative framework. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 15(3), 169–182.

So, what exactly is getting restored by a restorative environment? According to the Kaplans, it’s attention. They argue that attention is a limited, deplete-able resource and certain environments, nature being the best example, can fill that depleted attention reservoir right back up (they call this attention restoration theory). In order for an environment to restore one’s attention, it must have the following four qualities at once: being away, fascination, extent, and compatibility.

The first quality is that the environment gives a sense of being away. For an environment to be restorative, it must feel like you have escaped or withdrawn from your ordinary (attention depleting) environment.

The second quality is that the place you escape to must be interesting, it must have fascination. Fascination is tricky because there are fascinating things that are not restorative, for example a train wreck or some trollish Twitter thread. Fascination in the Kaplan’s sense is a magical (that’s my word) quality of an environment where your attention is held but not drained. To better approximate this non-draining quality of fascination, some use the phrase soft fascination (like a walk in nature) as distinct from hard fascination (like a riveting television show).

In addition to being away in a fascinating space, the third quality a restorative environment must have is extent. That is to say it must feel like “another world” entirely from the one you’re escaping. To have extent, this “other world” must be explorable without being overwhelming. Places with extent strike a good balance between 1) having lots to explore, and 2) giving you the freedom to do so, while 3) also having enough structure so you feel safe, without 4) feeling like they’re full of restrictions and rules. It should be noted that the extent doesn’t have to involve physical space, it can be an internal experience, too.

And then on top of everything, the fourth quality a restorative environment must have is compatibility. There must be a rightness to how you want to use the space and what the space is for. If you found a spot that met the other requirements (it was away from it all, had soft fascination, and plenty you were eager and safe to explore), but wasn't made for that purpose or didn't accept your presence there, it wouldn't be restorative. Indeed, it might be quite stressful or frustrating. To be restorative, the space has to work for you and you have to work for the space.

Introducing Contempla-tech

Mostly, I lament the unintended consequences of technology that make our devices and apps addictive and distracting. I feel vulnerable to their promise of connection, social validation, and self-betterment. While I am wary of the creepy advertising, mysterious algorithms, and indicators that my conversations and search history are being monitored, I still carry my device everywhere and often find myself mindlessly poking at it in hopes of a reward.

I have become especially complain-y and pessimistic about the viability of apps and devices that promise to make us more mindful. I have little hope that their values will survive uncorrupted in a market that requires them to vie for our attention, data, and reward-driven habituation. Yes, it’s complicated. Tech is good and bad and many points in between at the same time. But mostly, for me right now? It's pretty bad.

To balance my perspective, I have challenged myself to discover bits and pieces of technology that enable me to live a life I want to live — specifically, a life with more integrity and presence. By and large, these won’t be features a design team thought up and built, they'll be minor and unintended aspects of our apps and devices that invite, enable, or facilitate contemplative experiences without meaning to. Right now, I'm calling these features "contempla-tech" as in "contemplative technology.” As I discover examples, I'll document and share them here. Here's the first one.

Setting a password with intention

In 2014, I began setting a New Year's intention (as opposed to a resolution) at the recommendation of my friend Frances. I also decided to change my password to that intention so that I'd be reminded of it every day. It's worked beautifully. I've set five intentions in the years since and they’ve been a transformative force in my life. Typing out my yearly intention each day regularly reminds me of it, and I’m not sure how committed to it I’d be otherwise. If I had software that took away my need to type passwords, I would feel impoverished. Those pauses where I must type my password to continue have become an opportunity to remind myself to become the person I want to be.

An Invitation

Has technology surprised you by fostering slowness, presence, mindfulness, or compassion in your life? Was it intended or unintended or maybe a both? Please tell me about it.

Reading is Useless: A 10-Week Experiment in Contemplative Reading

This morning, I published a reflection on a 10-week "contemplative reading" experiment I conducted last quarter. By contemplative reading, I mean I paid attention to the experience of reading itself alongside paying attention to the text I was reading. It was a transformative experience for me and I hope that I'll continue to prioritize this way of reading as my coursework continues. Here it is:

Reading is Useless: A 10-Week Experiment in Contemplative Reading

I hope you are enriched by this reflection. Please let me know what thoughts or experiments it inspires in you.

Reading Strategy: Annotations

The above image is a page from Thomas Merton's book, Love and Living. I would like to use it as a reference to demonstrate how I'm annotating my academic reading these days. 

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Strategy 1: Underlining passages that resonate. 

I'm a heavy underliner. I used to feel a bit embarrassed about it as if I weren't smart enough to only highlight the most important things. Or, that I wasn't skilled enough to remember everything. But now, I look at underlining as a way to relate to the text. Almost the same as if I were to nod my head in understanding while talking to someone. 

Strategy 2: Highlighting confusing parts.

As I mentioned last week, I've started a shameless habit of marking anything I don't understand while I'm reading. It could be that I get the gist of it, but wouldn't really be able to explain it. Or that I have no idea at all and need to look it up, which was the case here. I see these highlights as evidence of paying good attention and being curious. 

Strategy 3: Marking when I'm distracted.

A habit I picked up with the Pomodoro Technique is to mark when I felt an internal pull of distraction. I mark this with a dash (-). You can also mark when you experience an external pull of distraction (like a phone ringing or a person stopping by). I mark that with a hash (#). In this reading, I got distracted internally at exactly that point in the text. 

Strategy 4: Marking when the bell rings.

As I mentioned last week, I've been working on a practice of contemplative reading and part of that is playing a bell of mindfulness every three minutes using an app on my phone. I mark each time the bell goes off with a small circle. This helps me be present to the bell and it also helps me see patterns in the pace of my reading.

Strategy 5: Annotating my thoughts.

I used to write in the margins, but since there's hardly ever enough room I've begun to make notes in a different place and note them in the readings with a circled letter of the alphabet. Sometimes I type my annotations and sometimes I write them in my Bullet Journal. For this reading, I wrote in my journal. The annotation simply says, "R. Don't follow ballgame." I wrote this because I feel I get the first two points (there is no me or there is nothing), but I'm not sure what it means that "me seeing me" means I'm not in the ballgame. Is it that "I" don't participate in life because the true self is the one observing the self in the ballgame? Yeah, not sure. But the annotation will come in handy when I talk this over with my advisor.

Strategy 6: Marking key points.

I mark key points with an asterisk, which is probably the most helpful strategy of all those listed. It's helpful when I write the reading note and it's helpful when I'm in conversation with others and my mind is scrambling to remember what I found particularly important about a text. It's very easy to spot while skimming several pages and a good reading strategy in general to be looking for key points while you go.