Usability
Reminder!
Earth Hour will soon occur, on Saturday 27 of March from 8.30 pm, we are all recommended to shut down our lighting for one hour. A good recommendation is to practice an Earth Hour every day, during lunch or other convenient time. And do not forget also to switch off your computer.
Read how to activiate energy saving function on your computer.
Do you have problems keeping up with your Twitter flow?
Well one of the reasons is that more than 50 million Twitters are messaged a day! According to Kevin Weil, head analyst at Twitter, the use of the Twitter service has exploded. Extra services like “Manage Twitter” has started, as a device to clearing the users you are following.
What do you do while reading this text? Or looking up from the newspaper, watching the TV in the background? Or reading with one eye a text message, just arrived in your cell phone? Or updating your Facebook status? Thinking quickly about an email you should have answered yesterday? Yes, you probably take your time with a lot of little things as you are trying to focus on reading an article.
This is how our media and communications processes often look today. This form of “wandering attention”, that comes from the way we always are available, is called “continuous partial attention”, by the American scientist and technology thinker Linda Stone. She is a writer and consultant who coined this phrase in 1998. Stone also coined “email apnea” in 2008, showing that people tend to keep their breath while e-mailing, starting biochemical processes in the body, in the long run resulting in stress related illnesses.
But even if the ever shared attention is stressful for us Linda Stone and other researchers have found that there are advantages in being distracted or taking small breaks when we are focused on a task. Short breaks from job may give new energy and new ideas about how to solved tasks. According to study results from researcher Michael Kane, University of North Carolina, our focus moves from what we are doing about one third of the time. It indicates that this behavior probably plays an important part in our brains. Other studies also show that when we are daydreaming, or allowing the mind to fly freely for a while, brain regions associated with savings in long-term memory are activated, helping the brain to save information better. When the mind flaps away in non mental demanding breaks it activates the parts of the brain that helps us to solve problems. So when we look out of the window thinking of nothing special or standing in the shower, where we are not connected, our brain keeps doing advanced creative work. This is something completely different from continious partial attention!
So think about how you breathe when unopened e-mails fill the screen. And begin to see Facebook and looking out of the windows not as time wasters or signs of poor work ethic but as important parts of your job performance. For even though most of us cannot take a three-hour walk in the woods during working hours, maybe a bit wandering surfing through the images from your friend’s bachelor party can make you a little more creative and efficient.
I quote Linda from her web: “Attention is the most powerful tool of the human spirit. We can enhance or augment our attention with practices like meditation and exercise, diffuse it with technologies like email and Blackberries, or alter it with phamaceuticals. In the end, though, we are fully responsible for how we choose to use this extraordinary tool.”
Read more at www.lindastone.net
In the Architect journal Room I read Sam Sundberg´s chronicle about something I found utmost thoughtful. Sam is author and outdoor journalist and he has reflected over the symbol for the 2000 century. This is his conclusion:
If a picture is to conclude the 2000 century it will neither be the crasched twin towers, nor the forests of bragging skyscrapers in Shanghai or Dubai. No, the symbol is the empty search field. We meet it daily in Google, Wikipedia, Spotify, Eniro, the Pirate Bay and everywhere on the web where we are looking for something: the persistently pocking marker. “What do you search for” it asks. “What do you do here?” “What do you want“?
Instead of moving about in the city, chasing along streets and buildings with our eyes, we are seated at our keyboard, staring at the search field. Instead of groping about in countless stores chasing for a good laptop we search for it on the web, cross referring among search engines and sites for price comparisions.
Smart architects have realized that the city space is changing in its margins and thus design and build houses in two dimensions, on our web browsers! Zaha Hadid has reached the most advanced solutions in his Google Earth-architecture – the buildings look better from above than in street level.
Whith a huge investment on smart phones they create a constant presence in the streets. The building The Cloud, proposed at the Olympic arena in 2012, is an internet time observation platform. It takes the observer on a strange sky trip which is full of information noise. This is the empty search field in a physical shape. Because, when climbing up its twisted, windling stairs, blinking and lost, we ask ourself: why are we not at home watching the olympic games in our web browser?
