What my 4 year old thinks I do on the computer

Jess Holbrook
2 min readJan 4, 2015

--

My 4 year old daughter was trying to procrastinate before nap time by asking me what I was doing on the computer. When I asked her, “What do you think I’m doing?”, she used the app icons as a guide. Here’s her take:

If you didn’t catch that (from right to left):

“recycle” (Recycle Bin)
unintelligible, but along the lines of…“or be seen..in ar dee ba…are dee oh…” (open windows)
“going to a new planet” (link in the Dock)
“coloring” (Chrome)
“doing your compass” (Safari)
“writing” (Notepad)
“doing your numbers” (Wunderlist)
“taking pictures” (iPhotos)
unintelligible but along the lines of “sploding crappy” (Sonos)
“singing” (iTunes)
“doing your ABC’s” (Skype)
“telephoning” (FaceTime)
“writing” (App Store)
“making silly faces”

Close enough.

--

--

Jess Holbrook

Head of User Research for Responsible AI at Meta. Formerly co-lead of the People + AI Research (PAIR) team at Google. Board Member, Forging Youth Resilience.