In-Class Questions:
- What is one time or place where you are in complete control of your attention? The place and time might vary because I only have a consistent schedule for about three things in my life. The first time and place that I can think of is when I am skiing. Last year I fell in love with skiing, and it is one of the only times and places where I am less worried about my phone and more worried about the activity at hand. It gets to the point where I won’t respond to people for a minimum of 5 hours.
2. When has an app helped you and when has an app moved you away from your goal? An app that helps me almost daily is my music app. It can be used for many different things, like helping you focus while doing an assignment or helping you overcome boredom on a long car ride. It can even help me get “in the zone” while playing a sport. While this app doesn’t usually pull me away from my goal, it still sometimes can. For example, when you arrive at your destination, you might not want to get out of the car right away because there is a really good song playing.
3. Pick a useful app and suggest a design choice that makes it remain useful but eliminates a dark pattern: The app that I would choose is any education app that is out in the world for free. Most education apps will have really useful tools, designs, or information from decades of past students, but they either make you pay an insane amount to use them, or they have so many ads that it makes the app unusable. The app will then also beg you to submit some of your own work or knowledge so they can take advantage of your hard work and grow. They feed on the fact that you might be struggling with homework and need an answer just to get data and attention from the user, then give nothing in return. So if I had to change one thing, it would be to make them free to use and ad-free. With these changes, they will still get your attention and all the data from your homework, but at least you will actually get what you were looking for while studying.
3. B Pick the thing that upsets you most in the larger culture of the world that you live in: A large problem in the world for me is that the bar for success is being slowly lowered over time, and it is making the youth of our world reach less and less for new heights. Even in the last ten years, high school and college have gotten easier and easier to pass, material-wise, and harder to pass just with time, money, and the mental health of its students. To change this, a more humane design of the education system would help. For example, less time in school and in seats, more exercise, and at least one life skills class each quarter, especially in the early stages of grade school and high school, would be wildly beneficial to combat this.
