Mindful Technologies Session @ QS 2011

We had a great mini-workshop (called a breakout session) on day 1 at the Quantified Self Conference 2011 for Mindful Technologies. The rest of the slides will be posted soon. The one-page slide we used for discussion is below:

The feedback was very useful in framing HOW participants would use these heuristics in their own contexts of data design. Also, I’m a geek. The slide deck had a Star Wars metaphor the three tenets of Mindfulness (Attention → Intention →Attitude) in relation to creating Mindful Technologies. People dug the quotes from Jedi maxims to Mindfulness: Qui-gon on being present, Anakin on gap between intention & behavior, and Yoda on maintaining the right attitude. The big takeaway for me was people understood the central theme: “Attention to data can only work with the proper attitude and intention for healthful habit change.” I came away highly encouraged by the workshop and look forward to be in touch with many others thinking about mindfulness.

During the session, our conversation went from ways others used similar concepts in Mindfulness to their work to smiling where we all exchanged thoughts on Ron Gutman‘s Ignite talk earlier in the day and my Calming Tech work with Sean Rose. It was great to see how many Quantified Self folk already understood the link between mind and body. Later, I talked to Rich Goldstein (from Yoga Yoga, a Yogi in the purest sense of the word) & Fred Trotter (health hacker extraordinaire) over dinner about how Rich frames mindfulness with a background in the behavior sciences.

The organizers were awesome in keeping sessions on track and Seth Roberts and Gary Wolf kicked off an plenary session detailing the principle behind quantifying science. Seth Roberts gave the more powerful examples from his blog including a pilot on seeing faces as a proxy to increasing positive mood the next day. This made me think of the smiling studies Sean Rose and I have been piloting in CalmingTech course. The underlying mechanism is very similar: seeing faces makes you happier. The behavior of feeling happier for Seth happened a day after the trigger, which is an interesting disconnect on the delay of this response. The closing keynote by Kevin Kelly was great in framing how data can and will be used in our near lifetimes. Kevin is a great visionary in making some great points on the organization of data and raised the meta-question of the “Quantifiable Self”.

My insight in framing his 4 current trends & 4 future questions are still developing: we are thinking about the right problems in the right space. The purpose of the data we are collecting is yet to be determined. By self-experimentation & hacking, we are creating the hypothesis generating that can drive innovation for years. Since the community is very diverse (more diverse than CHI), we will be able to solve many smaller solutions to drive towards a larger space of self-fulfillment through tracking data, a proxy for learning more about ourselves.

Throughout the conference Ian Li gave a cool overview of his current work, a platform to enable development for scalable visualization of your data. I was then introduced to MedHelp by John de Souza, a citizen-science-oriented start-up looking at using his start-up in making an impact upon communication & framing of data. In a workshop, Michael Kim teamed up with FourSquare guru Naveen Selvadurai on Gamification and how they are currently applying Martin Seligman’s Positive Psychology mantra PERMA to the design of mobile games. Fred Trotter gave an amazing suite of tools for an Open Source Game Layer as part of his Programmable Self session. Steve Dean and Ernesto Ramirez gave an overview of some of the key techniques in behavior design, centering a lot on the simple, social, fun product & behavior model by BJ Fogg.

In a few days I will be posting a full slide-deck from my talk and some of key takeaways from breakout sessions.

We’ll cap off with some happy pictures:

Smiling is contagious! Michael Kim and I just finished our sessions after an Extreme Quantified Self Makeover to remodel the room for our projector set-up!

Capping off an amazing first day at Quantified Self 2011, Fred and Rich and I relax over very authentic Mexican food & great conversation. Zen.