top of page
UX of Boredom
14 Oct - 28 Oct
Design Breif
Design a way to express the value of boredom.
Back To Top
Team
Understanding boredom
Boredom is like the sense of emptiness and the existential thought of being meaningless (Popova, 2021) To express its value; we first tried to understand what it means for different people in different contexts. We wanted to hear stories about their everyday lives where they felt bored and what they did at that moment. We talked to several people around, and using directive storytelling, we tried to uncover their boredom.
"Has boredom ever influenced you positively?"
Boredom is like the sense of emptiness, and the existential thought of being meaningless (Popova, 2021) To express its value, we first tried to understand what it means for different people in different contexts. We wanted to hear stories about their everyday lives where they felt they were bored and what they did at that moment. We talked to several people around and using directive storytelling we tried to uncover the boredom for them.
WEEK 1
Ideating and reflecting on values
The answer to this question has never been straightforward, but we could uncover the hidden values. We started ideating experiences on sheets of paper to reflect on them. The expression of experience was not popping out, and hence we decided to use the performance technique called improvisational acting. A creative act performed without much prior thought (Gerber, 2007), allows us to feel the intricacies associated with the values and craft the experience with the nitty-gritty. We also materialized the thoughts and asked people to experience and give us the feedback to which we saw people connecting more to the idea of introspection and creativity.
Activities focused on introspection and creativity
Activity 1: Uncovering Creativity
The participants were asked to either sit ideal for 20 minutes or design their way out of boredom with some materials on the table within a bland environment. Later, when the participants were asked why they chose to play with materials rather than sit ideal, one of them said I like playing around with things while the other said he was thinking and was confused, but then he had nothing else to do. In their responses, we understood that creating something was not intentional until they started to get some shapes and realistic ideas.
Activity 2: Experiencing Introspection
We hung several of the introspection thoughts coming straight out of our participant's minds for people to read and realize if this is what they think when they introspect. Interestingly, most folks could relate to questions than statements, but a few could not relate because of non-gender-neutral questions.
Week 1 Presentation
WEEK 2
Week 1 Feedback
The Idea of creativity and introspection as values could be clubbed in the experience.
Look at how we are alive and how we gain experience of slef
The tangible and materialistic outcome for creativity as value is more exciting.
Understand volume, articulacy, language, audibility of the inner voice
The thoughts written on papers seem stereotyped and forced fit to an individual's personality.
Look for frequency within brain science and brain states
Diving deep in introspection
Understanding brain activities during boredom
Introspection gives us a way to step away from the present and allows us to reflect on our past selves. For example, we saw how alpha, beta, gamma, and theta waves co-exist in our brains when we are bored during our research into brainwaves. Interestingly, the brains of people prone to boredom react differently than those who could quickly cope with boredom (Carne, 2021).
Conducting Activity
Defining environment and context of introspection
While we got more excited about understanding volume, articulacy, language, audibility of the inner voice, we knew it depended on context and environment. So although there could have been many places, we deliberately choose traffic signals where people often wait for a specific time and self-reflect on themselves.
Recording inner voices
We conducted an activity where we asked people to cross the road in the traffic signals and later record what they were thinking at that moment. It was exciting to see how people spoke their native languages inside their minds with different tonalities.
Inner Voice 1&2
Inner Voice 3&4
Inner Voice 5&6
Inner Voice 7&8
Inner Voice 9&10
Ideation of inner voice experience
We finally decided to use Arduino and a few potentiometers to control these audios within the processing environment. It would not have been possible without the help of the CTL lab. Each potentiometer was assigned to two consecutive playing audios. It was not working till the last day, and we were all thinking about alternative plans.
"Finally, it worked!"
Week 2 Presentation
Presenting the inner voice
The experience allowed people to go inside the brain of random people introspecting and self-reflecting at street crossings. However, they had the control to turn up or down the individual inner voices at the same time.
Citations
Popova, M., 2021. Kierkegaard on Boredom, Why Cat Listicles Fail to Answer the Soul’s Cry, and the Only True Cure for Existential Emptiness. [online] The Marginalian. Available at: <https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/01/14/kierkegaard-boredom-idleness-either-or/> [Accessed 14 December 2021].
Gerber, E., 2007, April. Improvisation principles and techniques for design. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 1069-1072).
Carne, N., 2021. Brain waves reveal when boredom kicks in. [online] Cosmos Magazine. Available at: <https://cosmosmagazine.com/science/biology/brain-waves-reveal-when-boredom-kicks-in/> [Accessed 21 December 2021].
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
bottom of page