This month has been great for learning new terms. I remember the last great term that I really liked was ‘Design Wank’ which I use now and again to describe the sometimes condescending elitist wanky attitude that I sense from some self proclaimed ‘designers’, which can be usually characterised by use of wanky jargon, or some image of some ridiculously impractical greenwash ‘Eco building’ which is eco because its got solar panels on it and only 0.025% of the population can afford to live in.
Eco pods - Design wank random case file #1
Hermes Green Yacht - Design wank random case file #2
Below is NOT design wank:
William Kamkwamba a.k.a (a modern day legend) - The african villager who went to the library, learned about electricity and built a wind generator out of spare parts for his village because of lack of infrastructure.
Sorry, I got side totally tracked!
The new term I picked up is called ‘Self Hacking’. I picked it up from a really interesting bunch of people that I met through a meetup group called ‘The Quantified Self’. http://quantifiedself.com/ This group originally started in San Francisco but has since moved on to London amongst other cities.
As the name suggests, its a group of people who aim to improve their quality of life and understand themselves through self tracking. We probably all do it in some way or another ie. write a journal etc. But once we collect information, what do we do with it? Do we even think of it as a dataset that can be mined?
‘Self Hackers’ track all sorts of things such as sleep patterns, heart rate etc. I used to track my breakdance training sessions in a bid to find the perfect training formula (I quit when I realised I was just rationalising my procrastination).
These days in the 2.0 era, it makes sense though that people are empowered to experiment on themselves and share their findings. Given that many studies are carried out over society and groups as a whole, it makes sense too that people are design their own experiments, since there is a big difference if group psychology and the individual as well as the fact that we have our own intricacies.
Hack your mood
Present at this event was one of the creators of http://www.moodscope.com/ Jon Cousins, who has been tracking his and other people’s emotions everyday since 2004. He has found that the tracking and sharing of emotion data with friends leads to a longer term sustained improvement in emotion. One of the smart things about the approach is that it doesn’t ask you ‘How do you feel?’ directly. Instead your emotion is derived through a card game, which is much harder to lie to.
Moodscope happiness trend ticker
Moodscope cards
One of the things that I learned from this group was that for issues such as stress or depression - the act or tracking itself (and rationalising) leads to quantifiable positive change.
More questions?
As with most things, the more you learn, the more questions you have.
- As I mentioned in a presentation once before about visualisation, collecting and presenting data for the sake of collecting and presenting data doesnt necessarily lead to any positive change. Maybe in the case of human psychology, I was wrong?
- It takes a certain type of personal mindset to bother to self hack (seek answers through experimentation as opposed to external sources). Is the data reliable, given that those bothering to self hack are those who would typically be actively seeking (and on their way to) improvement anyways? ie: why would people who dont care about energy want energy meters?
- Can the self-hacking (personalised self analysis- > positive personal change) way of thinking apply to achieve sustainable outcomes at the aggregate level?
