The ship of Thesis
Making sense of what’s on my mind and what’s out there
4 Weeks. Wow.
Last week went by in scoring for projects, information on human behavioural study, Empathy and Emotions and design for emotional needs. Each week makes me correct and cross multiple assumptions from the first week, let’s just say I’m learning the wrongings while writing.
I chose to study Mood Management with the Quantified Self. It’s only fair to say that everybody deals with emotional stress from time to time. So this got me to research on some of the common emotional issues we deal with, everyday.
A few months ago, I worked on a mobile application on the topic of the Quantified Self. I designed a mobile app called “Moodle” that monitored your moods and made you log your mood thrice a day to help you analyse your mood health. This was facinating because using a smartphone to log your mood was new and it was easier than maintaining a paper diary, as you’re constantly interacting with it in the day. It got me thinking about how we are constantly trying to remain happy..or deal with various situations in a balanced way. A lot of times, stress causes unnecessary health issues. Like I mentioned earlier, they don’t show up until later in life. Every present is building your future’s foundation.
In one of the cases, people have actively been tracking their activity. I see a lot of people use wearable devices to monitor health and fitness. I would like to now make sense of how it all began, emotions, quantifying data and our behaviour. Here are some of the excerpts from my study on Behaviour, Empathy, Emotions and Neuroscience.
Also, on a side note, I love research. Agreed, it can be painstakingly annoying if you spend too much time digging up information but I’ve realised talking to people reveals surprising things at the same time. Talk to people. There is always someone who has thought about and obsessed over something much more than you and they would be glad to share that knowledge with you. I am grateful for having a supportive and encouraging network!
Literature, Discussions and Disciplinary Areas
Snigdha Nanduri, May 4th, 2016.
“How are you?”
In the history of questions, this one seems to be the most confronting of all. Not only does it get you to respond but it expects you to describe your current state of being and communicate it. This is the question that makes you present yourself to the other person. A cheerful, chirpy personality? A confident, balanced individual? A dull, pre-occupied candidate? This instant defines your state of being and is often the first sign of connection from another person, being interested in you. We’re all social creatures and we have mastered the art of communicating with not only words, but gestures too. However, human beings have blindspots in judgements and we make errors. Sometimes it’s strange that we can’t even answer simple questions. How did you feel last weekend with your children? How long did that shoulder pain last? When did you last meet your girlfriends over a drink? In the life of a woman, a typical day includes many tasks, managing many people and being completely aware of their own needs.
Human beings have blindspots in judgements and we make errors. Sometimes it’s strange that we can’t even answer simple questions.
In the era of efficiency, we are constantly forced to be our best selves at work, home, anywhere our presence is required. We strive towards a life with good health and happiness, often sacrificing our own. This is deeply rooted to our birth and how we learn from our surroundings. We may experience feelings according to our actions, to what we confront or expose ourselves to. We are animals that learn through our behaviours and their consequences. As early as birth, we may experience rewards and/or consequences from the act of being born. As a child, we want to feel safe and comfortable with our mother as rewards and fear or neglect would be perceived as being unrewarded. The environment responds during or following the child’s expression, from being held, cuddled, loved or ignored, shouted at or struck.
Ultimately, we can say that all humans contain emotions and this is universal. It is what we do with emotions that makes us different.
As we grow older, we learn to understand our emotions. They are deeply linked to our biological function. We have come to realise that the physical and mental aspects of our body function like a team. They compliment one another. Encouraging healthy thoughts will reflect in a healthy state of living. And vice versa.
Cognitive therapists, when discussing depression, argue that most people who are depressed tend to concentrate of the worst aspects of themselves, their world, their circumstances and their future, living in constant pessimism and self blame.
We are all constantly fighting this battle, regardless of however dramatic it may sound. Most of us internally deal with a lot of modern stress that was absent a few decades ago. A large body of scientific evidence shows that chronic stress damages everything from our psychological health to our sexual performance to our immune systems. Long term stress decreases our ability to sense hormones which fool our bodies into thinking there is a chronic infection or assault on our body. Short term stress on the other hand is actually good for the immune system. Taking the case of skydivers or any adventure sport enthusiasts, studies have shown that increase in their adrenaline levels add to the number of a certain type of immune system component known as killer cell. These play a great role when your body is infected and they respond before the antibodies have a chance to kick into action. (Pg 117, Pandora’s Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilisation, By Spencer Wells)
A very good reason why we deal with stress either way is due to the shaping of the new society. Apart from becoming independent and still maintaining regular social relationships, we tend to deal with the space we occupy as individuals, physically and mentally. There could be another intriguing possibility of how the future would be shaped referring to the current present. With technology, we would be able to design a future that’s fit for our physical and mental well-being. Not that it’s postponed for the future, but we have already embarked on a journey of creating a healthy life with the help of various computing devices that we have learnt to be dependent on.
Our attention is largely demanded by these devices and co-incidentally we have allowed them to be an extension of ourselves. We log our data, communicate with each other and store information of memories. They are not entirely built upon human emotions, but have become supporters of them. Earlier forms of these devices existed in non-transportable forms or painful to take along. Until recently, when these devices grew smaller and offered much more than what they previously used to.
Physical Fitness became increasingly important in the last few years and technology tried to help us with maintaining good health and a fit body by offering various solutions. Gordon Allport, writing in 1942, pointed out that an acquaintance with the “particulars of life” is the beginning of all psychological knowledge — scientific or otherwise. He says,
“Psychology needs to concern itself with life as it is lived, with significant total-processes of the sort revealed in consecutive and complete life documents”.
The Quantified self movement has encouraged people to use computers, smartphones, various devices and paper and pen to gather one’s data relating to sleep, fitness, diet and mood. Also known as Personal Informatics, it represents a school of thought addressed to use technologies for gathering data on different aspects of people’s everyday lives, for gaining self-awareness or producing behavior change. (Narrating the Quantified Self, Dize Hilviu and Amon Rapp)
It is suggested that reflecting on and correcting one’s own thoughts and plans would feel like something, and that phenomenal consciousness may occur when this type of monitoring process is taking place.
One of the key reasons to reflect regularly, acknowledge and analyze our activities is to gain an understanding of our life and the choices we make in it. A primary reason to start tracking is to reach a goal. A goal can only bring in the necessary steps to organise your time and behaviour, which constantly checking in if you’ve reached closer to it or haven’t made much progress.
“A goal is a dream with a deadline”
“A goal is a dream with a deadline” is a commonly heard phrase. It brings to introspect three parts of the process 1) A Goal: Defined as “the end toward which effort is directed”, an achievement. 2) A dream, which is a personal purpose that one believes in and 3) A deadline, which involves setting a timeline to the accomplishment. (Kansas City Business Journal (MO),
Here’s how to hit your deadlines before they hit you by Harvey Mackay)
Our days consist of numerous activities demanding our attention. Each of these activities engage us physically and emotionally, there by requiring both of these activities to be in sync with one another. Understanding our body not only pertains to physical factors but psychological factors too. This is the reason on some days, even though you appear physically fit, you wouldn’t feel like you are giving you best to your job.
Technology has come far by helping us understand our body’s dynamics but what about our emotional dynamics?
A clinical psychologist and a researcher at Intel, Margaret Morris used a mobile phone “called the mood phone” to build a bond with the user to track emotions. It cultivated emotional self-awareness by having people mood-map throughout the day and ask people to reinterpret things and question them in a process called Cognitive Reappraisal. She discusses a man whose moods dropped dramatically and he tracked his moods to start identifying patterns in mood. He noticed that he had a rushed transition from home to work and timed himself to take a break during this process. It helped him take control over his mood and changed his relationship with his members. The mood phone stands for a trusted portal device that captures this information, which was a private object. One that cultivates safe bonds with people and enables sharing.
Predicted to be worth 31.27 billion USD by 2020, I believe that the birth of wearable technology happened with this principle: Using an object that cultivates an emotional bond with the user and camouflage its purpose so that it remains a personal tracker of the user’s ativities. However, there are many other ways that one can track physical and mental activities today, thanks to technological advancements.
Quantified Data also brings into picture the other end of the purpose: Data Visualisation. How do we understand the data being gathered to help us achieve our goals? Ultimately, all of the information has to be converted into our language to help us take necessary steps for a better well being. A woman suffering with emotional issues may reach out to mental health experts who may prescribe medication depending on the seriousness of the issue. However, in the future it would obviously benefit the patient and the expert if they engage in a data collection method to analyse the progress, especially to understand the problem before treating the problem.
One of the important reasons we suffer emotionally is due to our lack of connection between emotions and the choices we make in our life.
Since the rise of technology, we have understood our capability to feel and understand our everday emotions. What used to be previously encountered in face to face, text based and voice based communication can now be experienced through digital mediums.
Most of these digital mediums are rich sources of data for gathering insights into people’s emotional wellbeing and eliciting a change in their behaviour through these emotions.
But before that, have you wondered what is the need to track emotions? How can technology help us understand ourselves? I did. So I began to understand the purpose behind tracking moods and how it could affect our behavior. One of the most common reasons to not track your moods is the constant reminder that you are consciously tracking it (and that can make you stressed!) and it’s tedious and nobody really enjoys logging their moods.
But there are times when tracking a mood is a good idea:
- You’ve constantly been feeling extremes of emotions. And you can’t understand why. Are they connected to your menstrual cycle, your exercise, alcohol consumption?
- You want to consult an expert regarding your emotional health and you need to track this information to report that.
- You’re dealing with a treatment change, medication or exercise and want to know if it is working.
- You’re pretty sure things are stable, but you just want to make sure and reflect.
I now aim to research on various methods that people have participated in to understand the state of the art technology available for Emotional Management. I am interested in designing for Emotional needs as there are currently many opportunities in the Mood Management sector of technological advances and in this analogous study, I would seek inspiration for understanding how people have identified emotional issues and solved them with the help of technology. I also would like to understand any concerns and worries people might raise on the topic of technology aiding in emotional issues so that I am aware of the challenges and limitations at the same time.
Questions, comments, feedback?
