Attentive Design

Attentive Design
How to build sustainable,

self-controlled attention
with digital design?
1
2
Attentive Design
How to build sustainable, self-controlled
attention with digital design?
Julia Racsko
2018 HEAD Genève
Racsko, Julia–Attentive design

Master Thesis, Media Design
Tutor: Daniel Pinkas
Set in Alegreya, Alegreya Sans and Alegreya Sans SC.

Cover and illustrations: Julia Racsko.
Contents
Introduction 1
Information, attention and the brain 5
What is attention? 5
Information as a reward and information foraging 11
Attention and economy 15
The methods developed to capture attention 15
Ethical design in the attention economy 21
How is our mind affected? 25
Controlling the self and the phone 25
The trail of the spotlight 28
Optimal experience as happiness 31
Getting to attentive design 37
High-level ideas: manifestos, regulation, legislation 39
Everyday business struggles 43
Designer’s tools and solutions 46
Conclusion 57
Acknowledgements 61
Appendix–Interviews 63
Darja Gartner&Jérémie Fontana 63
Ryan Rumsey 67
Geoffrey Dorne 70
Pamela Pavliscak 72
Bibliography 79
Introduction
What matters is not technology itself, but its
relationship to us.1
The place of technology in our lives is (still) changing. It feels like

digital devices are designed and redesigned to get physically and
mentally closer to us, and as they get smaller, they can be embedded in
more spaces and situations. Though we often leave desktop computers
at their own dedicated place, their pocket-sized versions come with us
everywhere, and even smaller ones are starting to claim space on, and
perhaps even in our bodies as wearables. However, shrinking the size
of computers and normalizing their use in most life situations was a
process neither instantaneous nor fully unexpected.
Mark Weiser in his seminal paper The Coming Age of Calm Technology 2
(1996) outlined the major waves of computing, considering them as
changes that fundamentally alter the place of technology in our lives.
The first wave is linked to the invention of the mainframe computer
from the 1940s, where many people share one computer, followed
by the wave of one personal computer for each person in the 1980s.
According to Weiser, the next step would take place when the internet
would connect personal computers, ushering in the current wave
of ubiquitous computing. Each person would use several devices.
These devices also provide a constant and instantly accessible source
1 Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown: “The Coming Age of Calm Technology” Xerox PARC,
1996.
2 Ibid.
1
of information (that is, when the bandwidth is wide enough and the
battery is charged). Smartphones act as an ‘external brain’, keeping us
constantly connected not only to information that we selected to store,
but also to anything that is accessible through the World Wide Web.
All computers and peripheral devices collect, process and
provide information between themselves, their users and more
recently (and problematically) to different companies offering
services through them.
The observation motivating my reflection on Attentive Design is
that with the overabundance of technologically mediated information
available at any given moment, attention has become the new
scarcity, as Herbert Simon famously pointed out decades before the
appearance of the internet:
In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a

dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information
consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes
the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a
poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently
among the overabundance of information sources that might
consume it.3
The wealth, or even glut, of information is hardly debatable, but

to ascertain whether it really saturates our attention capacity, it is
important to measure how much of our time and attention is actually
spent interacting with different computers, especially smartphones
over the last few years. According to a 2013 study by Nokia, people
looked at their phones an astonishing 150 times per day on average 4,
while iPhone users in 2016 unlocked their devices 80 times per day
3 Simon, H. A. “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World” 1971. in: Martin
Greenberger: “Computers, Communication, and the Public Interest, Baltimore.” MD: The
Johns Hopkins Press, pp. 40–41.
4 Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Venture Capital at KPCB Follow: “Mobile Users Reach
to Phone” LinkedIn SlideShare, 2013. slideshare.net/kleinerperkins/kpcb-internet-
trends-2013/52-Mobile_Users_Reach_to_Phone. (accessed January 1, 2018)
2
on average 5. Another study measuring the difference between self-
estimated and real smartphone usage on Android devices arrived to
a similar number, more than double of what participants estimated
about themselves.6 People trying to quantify other aspects of their
smartphone use in the same research were similarly inaccurate. The
daily active phone use added up to more than 5 hours (including when
the screens were not used, like listening to music), and 55% of all uses
were less than 30 seconds long.
A different approach is to measure not how often we look at but
how often we touch the screens of our phones,7 which is more than
2600 times per day for an average user, and passes 5400 touches
per day for a heavy user.8 It is noteworthy that when participants
learned about these numbers, they did not resolve to change their
habits; currently it seems tough to avoid 80 glances or 2600 touches
a day. Also, being able to connect anytime and anywhere has made
us expect quasi-immediate responsivity from others at all times.9 It
is important to note that the time spent on our smartphones is not
actually the total time spent with screens, since we often use several
of them simultaneously. However, laptops and televisions do not
permeate all areas of our lives, and are more often viewed together
with other people.
5 “How IOS Security Really Works - WWDC 2016 - Videos” Apple Developer developer.
apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2016/705/ (accessed January 1, 2018)
6 Andrews, Sally, David A. Ellis, Heather Shaw, and Lukasz Piwek: “Beyond Self-Report:
Tools to Compare Estimated and Real-World Smartphone Use” 2015, PLoS One, 10 (10),
1–9.
7 Winnick, Michael: “Putting a Finger on Our Phone Obsession” Resources for Remote,
Qualitative and in-Context Research, blog.dscout.com/mobile-touches (accessed January
1, 2018)
8 In this study, the average daily screen time was ‘only’ 145 minutes, and 225 minutes for
heavy users, but the interactions done on a locked phone screen, like viewing a new
notification or message, were not counted. These untracked interactions actually add up
to almost half of all phone interactions, so the results most likely are fairly similar in this
and the previous study which measured screen time.
9 Ian Towers, Linda Duxbury, Christopher Higgins, John Thomas, (2006) “Time thieves and
space invaders: technology, work and the organization”, Journal of Organizational Change
Management, Vol. 19 Issue: 5, pp.593-618
3
The reasons we glance or pick up our smartphones vary from
simple things like checking the time or turning off the alarm to reading
the news, writing emails and communicate with loved (and less
loved) ones throughout the day. It can inform, remind and entertain,
or even help us avoid other people. After coordinating meetings, the
second most reported reason to engage with smartphones was to
avoid boredom10 (a fact which will turn out to be important later on in
this research).
All in all, we look at the screen of the smartphone around 80 times a

day, touch it probably more than any other object and definitely more
than any other person (except maybe babies for their main caregivers).
According to Tristan Harris’s popular essay How Technology Hijacks
People’s Minds 11, the reason behind such an intimate relationship with
our phones is that “if, at any moment, reality gets dull or boring, our
phone offers something more pleasurable, more productive and even
more educational than whatever reality gives us.” However, escaping
from boring moments will not necessarily amount to “time well
spent” 12 or a “life well lived” ,13 as this thesis will attempt to demonstrate.
Starting with a definition of attention, we examine our relationship
to incoming information and this connection’s vulnerabilities in an
overwhelming media environment, and how these susceptibilities
enable technological companies to design for grabbing and
monetizing human attention. After analyzing how these design tools
and methods affect our mind and well-being, we will conclude with a
chapter about possible design solutions for protecting our attentional
capabilities; the proposals–coming from books, articles, talks, other
documents and in-person interviews–range from high-level ideas to
concrete everyday steps.
10 Pew Research Center “The Smartphone Difference” April, 2015. pewinternet.

org/2015/04/01/us-smartphone-use-in-2015/ (accessed January 1, 2018)
11 Tristan Harris. Essays. tristanharris.com/essays/ (accessed January 1, 2018)
12 ibid
13 ibid
4
Information, attention and the
brain
What is attention?
In order to understand why it is so easy to be induced to spend as
much time in front of screens as the above-mentioned studies indicate,
even when we recognize it may be against our longer-term interest, we
obviously have to look at what cognitive science tells us about how the
attentional aspects of the human brain work. Humans have struggled
with attention issues and cognitive control long before the appearance
of Facebook, the internet or screens in general.
One of the main difficulties in talking about and measuring

human attention is that it is a multi-layered concept referring to
multiple processes at the same time. The theory I will use throughout
this research is the one proposed by Adam Gazzaley and Dr. Larry D.
Rosen in their book The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech
World14. The most important component of attention singled out by
Gazzaley and Rosen is selectivity: directing the brain’s resources on
a goal, while ignoring everything else. Attending and suppressing,
however, are two distinct processes, both using our limited cognitive
resources. One common metaphor used to describe selectivity (and
attention) is the spotlight, which sheds focused light on something
while leaving everything else in relative darkness. This metaphor also
14 Gazzaley, Adam, and Larry D. Rosen: The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech
World. MIT Press, 2016.
5
enables to easily circumscribe three types of attentional limitations
relating to when (expectation), where (directionality) and how long
(sustainability) something remains within the scope of its light.15
15 Ibid. p32.
6
The expectation relative to the selection of an object depends on
past events, present internal goals or external perceptions and future
actions, or to put it simply, one notices what one is searching for. The
direction can be internal or external: if we want to recall a memory
or name, we need to ignore external stimuli as well as internal ones,
e.g. hunger. Sustaining the spotlight of our attention on an object
depends on the present state of our brain (fatigue, age, time of day,
etc) and how engaging that object is, which in turn depends on the
individual’s motivations and goals, connecting back to the aspect of
expectation. Maintaining our focus for an extended period of time can
become uncomfortable, and is often perceived as lingering on a boring
object or situation.
To sum it up, attention is one’s available cognitive capacity divided
between selecting an object to focus on and suppressing all other
stimuli, and what controls the process of selection and suppression is
expecting, directing and sustaining our cognitive capacity on an object.
Another important factor mentioned by Gazzaley and Rosen is
our limited working memory. The function of the working memory
is to hold information in our mind for a brief amount of time when
a stimulus is no longer present, bridging perception and future
action.16 To connect incoming information with our next move it is
necessary to maintain a sense of continuity, and this connection can
be easily disturbed as there is only so much information (7± 2 “chunks”
according to Miller’s law 17) that one person can hold in their mind at
the same time.
Last, but not least, it is important to note how setting goals is
much easier than enacting them, which is where the crucial notion
of interference enters the picture. Gazzaley and Rosen characterise
interference as “something that hinders, obstructs, impedes, or largely
16 Ibid. p34.

17 Miller, G. A. (1956). “The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our
capacity for processing information”. Psychological Review. 63 (2): 81–97.
7
derails another process” 18. Interferences can be internal, going on only
in our minds, or external, like an alarm or a warning sign. If we decide to
engage with an internal or external interference and change our course
of action, it is a case of interruption. If, in spite of the interference, we
continue with our action, Gazzaley and Rosen propose that we talk of
an internal or external distraction, as shown on the following diagram.
18 Gazzaley, Adam, and Larry D. Rosen. The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech
World. MIT Press, 2016. p5.
8
If someone talks to you while you are reading this, that’s a case of
external distraction. If you respond, then the other person’s comment
becomes an interruption. However if you linger on a previous
comment of this person while reading the next day, that is an internal
distraction. If it stops you in your reading, than you have internally self-
interrupted yourself.
Although in the last paragraphs, the susceptibility to interferences
appears to be a flaw of our mind, it should in fact count as a vital
component of the survival skills for mobile organisms. Noticing
the quiet steps of a predator or the glimmering of a stream could
mean life or death in prehistoric times. In the contemporary urban
environment, one could say red traffic lights interfere in the task of
driving to our destination in order to save the pedestrians (and the
driver from prison time). On the down side, interferences disturb the
process of selectivity, make it more challenging to ignore irrelevant
stimuli or fill up the working memory with information which may be
irrelevant. Interruptions also force the mind to engage in multitasking,
which, as we will see, is merely switching between different goals and
neural networks.
There are so many things that can interfere with executing even
a simple task, as everyone can confirm who has been standing in
their kitchen and not knowing why and how they got there. Potential
interferences multiply as our goals get more complicated and distant in
space and time. A general principle is that the more complex a system
(our own mind, our goals or our environment), the more vulnerable it
becomes to interferences. As Gazzaley and Rosen put it,
[t]he conflict is between our goal-setting abilities, which are so
highly evolved [...] and our goal-enactment abilities, which have not
evolved much at all from our primitive ancestors [..]. It is this conflict
that results in goal interference, and generates a palpable tension
in our minds—a tension between what we want to do and what
we can do.19
19 Ibid. p. 9
9
The gap of what we could do and what we actually achieve is an
important illustration of the limits of our attention. In typical cases,
our goal-setting is the result of a top-down internal thought process
started by inserting a time delay to pause and reflect between
perception and action. It is in this short timeframe that we exercise
executive functions: we evaluate the situation and decide on our
next action. Indeed the scale of top-down control is what mostly
makes the human mind special.20 Goals alter not only our actions but
also our perception of the world21, and often conflict with external,
stimulus-driven bottom-up influences that prompt automatic actions.
To demystify what this means, let’s take an example from our digital
environment: you set the top-down goal of writing down a reminder
on your phone when walking out of the office in the evening. However,
there are two notifications on the lockscreen: a work email and an app’s
marketing message, prompting you to take a decision: engage with
them, delay them or ignore them. Let’s say you delete the marketing
message, but you check the work email, which may delay the original
goal (writing a reminder), or make you forget it. Or you can go on with
the reminder and then check the email, or go on ignoring the email
until next morning (although it may occasionally pop up in your head
during the evening.) Among many other interferences, the red traffic
light at the pedestrian crossing in front of the office is vital in order to
not step in front of a car while executing the top-down goal of writing
this reminder; still, glancing up to the traffic light slows down the
original goal of typing the reminder. However, the two bottom-up
perceptions of notifications on the lock screen also required immediate
decision-making and maybe further engagement, and may have even
distracted you from the traffic light.
20 F. L. Coolidge and T. Wynn: “Executive Functions of the Frontal Lobes and the
Evolutionary Ascendancy of Homo Sapiens” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 11, no. 2
(2001): 255–260. Quoted in Gazzaley, Adam, and Larry D. Rosen. The Distracted Mind:
Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World. MIT Press, 2016.
World. MIT Press, 2016. p. 24.
10
Interferences in themselves are necessary to perceive and interact
with our environment: other people, urban spaces or nature. Since
these signals come from a given context, most of them are specific and
relevant to our current situation, unlike the omnipresent smartphones
and all the notifications that reach out everywhere, at all times.
Information as a reward and information

foraging
Most of the interferences we are subjected to are pieces of

information, whether they are news, a message or the alarm of the
ambulance. Although they disturb whatever we are doing at the
time, they are often welcome even when not really urgent, pleasant
or valuable. According to Bromberg-Martin and Hikosaka, acquiring
information makes a specific set of neurons fire the same way as
finding food or water: “[s]ingle dopamine neurons process both
primitive and cognitive rewards, and suggest that current theories of
reward-seeking must be revised to include information-seeking.” 22 Not
just the specific content but new information in itself is craved23, which
renders moderate consumption very unlikely in an environment that
provides more than what our brains can process. As the subtitle of The
Distracted Mind suggests, our Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World don’t
function optimally when we are faced with an overwhelming amount
of information. The speed of change in our cognitive limits (if there is
change at all) and in our technological evolution is mismatched.
22 E. S. Bromberg-Martin and O. Hikosaka: “Midbrain Dopamine Neurons Signal

Preference for Advance Information about Upcoming Rewards” Neuron 63, no. 1 (2009):
119–126.
23 Miller, George A. Informavores. The study of information: Interdisciplinary messages. 1984.
p. 111-113.
11
Interestingly, the decision to engage with an external or internal
distraction and turn it into an interruption can be aptly described
with the help of information foraging theory24, which aims to explain
how our need for information influences our decisions in the short-
term and the design of our environments in the long term. As the
original proponents of the theory explain, “the theory assumes that
people, when possible, will modify their strategies or the structure
of the environment to maximize their rate of gaining valuable
information.” 25 The model is analogous to food-foraging strategies
of animals, who have to find sufficient amounts of food in ‘patchy’
environments, where food is unevenly allocated in patches. The
strategies developed and modified in both cases are to maximize the
food or valuable information consumption while taking into account
the cost of searching. An example for an animal searching for food
in a ‘patchy’ environment would be a squirrel searching for nuts on
trees; as the squirrel continues eating, the quantity of acorns decrease,
and at a certain point it is better off searching for a new tree than
continue searching on the current, increasingly empty one. Though
squirrels or humans are neither fully rational nor have full knowledge
of any given situation (and a piece of information does not disappear
after consumption, it merely loses its sense of novelty), between
these limits the model can be used to describe and predict certain
behaviors and decisions.. As we spend most of our time in human-
made environments, our access to information is a function of the
design of these environments and our choices of interactions within
these ‘patches’.
The ‘patches’ in an information environment can be books, online
articles or any other media, or social communication–basically
everything perceived. Some sources contain more information,
others are easier to access. The estimated richness of a certain source
and whether is it worth switching away to another one depends on
24 Pirolli, Peter, and Stuart Card: “Information Foraging” Psychological Review 106.4 (1999):
643-75.
25 Ibid.
12
how much time and effort would be needed to move to another
source, how much valuable information is left in the current source,
and how much appears to be in the next one. Another variable is the
accessibility by which we measure the cost of transferring ourselves to
the next source. This usually changes over the long term by designing
easier access to information: book printing, public libraries, personal
computers, the internet, portable computers, etc.
The model of information foraging is useful in understanding how
modifying two factors (perceived richness of a source and ease of
access to the next resource) can encourage more frequent switching
to optimize the information consumption with strategic decision-
making. If it is easier to change with two taps than to stay, or one
resource is estimated to be fuller, even infinite, or more captivating,
then the optimal time to switch comes sooner.
13
In the first part of this research, we looked at what is comprised
in a somewhat simplified but hopefully nonetheless accurate theory
of attention, in what ways our cognitive capacity is limited, and how
interferences run up against these limits. As what we pay attention
to tends to be some kind of information, we also covered the fact that
our information consumption behavior can be usefully described as
maximizing by following optimization strategies. The second part
will examine how the limits of sustainable attention manifest in our
information-rich and high-interference digital environment.
14
Attention and economy
The methods developed to capture attention
The fact that attention is a finite resource is not a problem in itself.
Aiming to efficiently convey information has a long tradition with
diverse methods, from the ancient Latin book Rhetorica ad Herennium26
through newspapers to Wikipedia. However, these were not designed
for engagement per se, unlike what seems to be happening nowadays,
when “there are literally billions of dollars being spent to figure out
how to get you to look at one thing over another.” 27 Why and how did it
become so important to be noticed just for the sake of it?
The first instance of using attention as a success metric was in
a paper of Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page titled The Anatomy of a
Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine28. Unlike Google, other
search engines at the time produced “results [that] are often amusing
and expand users’ horizons, [but] they are often frustrating and
consume precious time.” 29 (Note how spending time unnecessarily is
yet considered a failure, not a success metric.30) How the PageRank
algorithm deemed a result relevant or not was, among other factors, to
26 With an English translation by Harry Caplan. Ad C. Herennium. De Ratione Dicendi

(Rhetorica Ad Herennium.). Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press, 1954.
27 Williams, J. Why It’s OK to Block Ads. Practical Ethics. blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.
uk/2015/10/why-its-ok-to-block-ads/ (accessed January 1, 2018)
28 Brin, S. and Page, L: “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine”
(1998) infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html (accessed January 1, 2018)
29 Ibid.
30 Justin Rosenstein, an ex-employee of Google mentions this in Building
Organic Software in a Fast-Food Nation. 16/02/2017, Medium.com
journal.thriveglobal.com/building-organic-sof t ware-in-a-fast-food-nation-
34a8197b1e2e (accessed January 23, 2018)
15
apply the existing model of counting the number of academic citations
to a certain publication, and the importance of those publications
referencing to the original one. This way PageRank could measure how
much these sites were in the center of attention; the links pointing to
a certain site and the number of its visitors became a success metric.
However, as Brin and Page point out in the same paper, they “expect
that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased
towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.” 31
Google’s mission statement to “[o]rganize the world’s information
and make it universally accessible and useful” 32 for everyone is
contradictory to giving preferential treatment to advertisers.
Companies will say that their goal is to make the world open and
connected or whatever. [...] But if you were to actually look at the
dashboards that they’re designing, the high-level metrics they’re
designing for, you probably wouldn’t see those things.33
Two key factors of the attention economy that I wish to emphasize

here emerged with the spread of Google Inc.: using attention in some
form as a success metric, and separating users and their needs from
customers and their wishes, internally prioritising the latter with high-
level design metrics, while communicating the former to the public
in generous marketing claims, inspiring other digital companies to
do the same.34
31 Brin, S. and Page, L: “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine”
(1998)infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html (accessed January 1, 2018)
32 Google. Our company. google.com/intl/en/about/our-company/ (accessed January 1,
2018)
33 Williams, James interviewed by Gallagher, Brian. Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Your
Free Will. Nautilus, Sep 21, 2017. (accessed January 25, 2018) nautil.us/issue/52/the-hive/
modern-media-is-a-dos-attack-on-your-free-will
34 Facebook’s login page welcomes users with these words: “[c]onnect with friends and
the world around you on Facebook”, not mentioning the price of collecting data and
receiving personalized advertising, or how hard it is technically and psychologically
to disconnect from Facebook. Twitter also opens with the promise of connecting and
keeping you updated, avoiding the topic of advertisement.
16
To see another important factor for the attention economy
emerge, we have to jump to the appearance of social networks,
when considering time spent on a site became a success metric, with
a prominent place in their annual reports. Facebook competes to
“provide social and communication products and services that are
designed to engage users and capture time spent on mobile devices
and online.” 35 Or take Tencent’s goal “to engage a large pool of casual
gamers and gradually advance them to mid-core and hard-core
categories”, as declared in their 2016 Annual Report.36 As for Twitter
user’s level of engagement and ad engagement, it is critical to its
success,37 as their revenue comes from advertisers. If these explicit
goals are not transparent enough, Sean Parker (president of Facebook
between 2004 and 2006), acknowledged in 2017 that the company’s
intention while building the product was to “consume as much of your
time and conscious attention as possible”,38 that they are “exploiting
a vulnerability in human psychology” and that they also “understood
this, consciously, and [...] did it anyway.” Tristan Harris, former design
ethicist at Google, concurs with Parker’s assessment: “[product
designers] play your psychological vulnerabilities (consciously and
unconsciously) against you in the race to grab your attention.”
When looking for evidence of their efforts, there are plenty
of examples to choose from. The bottomless feeds–used e.g. by
Twitter or Facebook–present themselves as particularly rich sources
of information in order to delay our transfer to the next source; they
also became a content delivery standard in the industry. The reverse
chronological order visible on the timestamp of each post evokes an
35 Facebook, Annual reports, 2016. investor.fb.com/financials/?section=annualreports
(accessed January 1, 2018)
36 Tencent, Annual Report, 2016. tencent.com/en-us/investor.html (accessed January 1,
2018)
37 Twitter, Annual report, 2016. investor.twitterinc.com/annuals-proxies.cfm (accessed
January 1, 2018)
38 Sean Parker: Facebook was designed to exploit human “vulnerability”, Nov 9, 2017, axios.com/
sean-parker-facebook-exploits-a-vulnerability-in-humans-2507917325.html (accessed
January 1, 2018)
17
unnecessary sense of urgency and immediacy. Notifications use similar
or identical signals within an application, regardless of the importance
and urgency (if at all) of the content. Some social media platforms even
introduced pseudo-notifications: these can be a marketing message
from the platform itself, other user’s activities or a suggestion based
on accumulated data about the user39, all coming through the same
channel where we interact with real people.
Video streaming services are also guilty in deliberately exploiting
vulnerabilities of attention and self-control to increase user’s time
spent in front of their content. Netflix actively encourages binge-
watching its content (movies and TV series) by small design tricks, such
as opting out of streaming the new video instead of actively starting it,
and they are not alone: YouTube also starts autoplaying the next video
on the recommendation list, unless the user actively opts out.
As we have seen in the previous part of this research, the mind

comes with quite a few particular features that can be exploited: its
goal-setting capabilities are stronger than its goal-enacting ones, it is
susceptible to interferences, it considers information as a reward and
it tries to maximize its consumption in the short term. Sending out an
average of 63.5 notifications a day40 (for Android devices, no similar
data found for iOS) is an aggressive way to draw on our craving for
information in order to distract from or interrupt in whatever we are
engaged in at the moment. Receiving so many external, bottom-up
triggers trying to catch our attention has prompted some designers
and engineers to build tools to manage all the interruptions (e.g.
from the control center of the iPhone or in the application’s settings)
39 Wilshere, Andrew: Are Notifications A Dark Pattern? 2017, trydesignlab.com/blog/

are-notifications-a-dark-pattern-ux-ui/ (accessed January 30, 2018)
40 Pielot, M., Church, K. and Oliveira, R: “An In-Situ Study of Mobile Phone Notifications”
MobileHCI ’14, September 23 - 26 2014, Toronto. pielot.org/pubs/Pielot2014-MobileHCI-
Notifications.pdf (accessed January 1, 2018)
18
and move from sound notifications to visual ones,41 similar to how
ad-blockers for desktop browsers became popular to control the
irrelevant commercial information.
Since external notifications turned out to be relatively manageable

and avoidable, they can’t account for all the times we reach for the phone.
However, internal triggers like boredom (which, as you may recall, is
the second most reported reason to engage with smartphones42) are
much harder to neutralize. It is indeed possible to ‘design a habit’ just
by following the instructions listed in Hooked43, Nir Eyal’s book detailing
how to gain and retain users of a product and increase engagement
in four steps. The cycle starts with a trigger, external in the beginning
(e.g. getting a notification about a new follower), and becoming
internal if the method is correctly applied (feeling a momentary pang
of boredom or loneliness). This trigger prompts an action (like opening
Twitter when having some time to kill), retrieving a variable reward.
The small dose of surprise in what we will exactly receive prevents
the product from becoming predictable and keeps holding the user’s
attention again and again (e.g. browsing different content each time
the user opens her News Feed). The last step closes the loop: right after
the positive interaction some kind of investment (data, money, effort)
is asked from the user, promising an improvement in the service for
next time (e.g. following people to customize displayed content). After
repeating this cycle a few times, the user most likely will develop an
internal trigger thanks to the combination of the following elements:
creating the mental association for the product as a relief from some
kind of frustration, boredom or another uncomfortable internal
41 Gallud, Jose A. Tesoriero, Ricardo. Smartphone Notifications: A Study on the Sound to
Soundless Tendency. Denmark, 2015. Proceeding MobileHCI ‘15 Proceedings of the 17th
International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and
Services Adjunct, P. 819-824 dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2793706 (accessed January 1,
2018)
42 Pew Research Center: The Smartphone Difference. April, 2015. pewinternet.
43 Eyal, Nir. Hooked: How to Build Habit-forming Products. Ebook. NY, NY: Portfolio/Penguin,
2014.
19
state; providing a variable reward that the user will start craving;
and extracting some investments from the user (time, effort, data)
that ties him to this product. The mental association can partially or
wholly replace the external triggers (advertisements, notifications)
with the internal emotional micro-needs of the user. As Nir Eyal states,
“[t]he habit-forming products we use are [...] there to provide some
sort of relief.” 44
Undergoing the cycle of trigger, action, variable reward and

investment creates a more personalized product experience each
time, and strengthens a habit, slowly but surely turning new users into
frequent and then compulsive users. Pondering whether this habit
44 Ibid.
20
adds not just instant gratification or temporary relief, but substantial
value to a person’s life is obviously not included in Eyal’s description.
He would rather trust the conscience of designers, product managers
and engineers45, which seems rather ironic after having described
in great detail how to create habit-forming or addictive products, in
principle enabling anyone, regardless of their intentions, to design
a habit for others. Eyals ‘ethical guideline’, the Manipulation Matrix,
includes only 2 yes-no questions: whether the product materially
improves the user’s life, and whether the maker is also a user. The
only case when he disapproves of using habit-forming methods if it
is the case of a double ‘no’. One should note that applying this matrix
would mean that all the methods of Facebook are ethical by definition,
since Mark Zuckerberg has his own profile; but perhaps it is rather
unrealistic to expect individuals to self-examine and then modify their
behavior accordingly when faced with carefully engineered practices
that promote unreflective action.
Ethical design in the attention economy

The Ethical Design Manifesto46 of ind.ie, a tiny social enterprise
founded by Aral Balkan (and others), provides a comprehensive
summary to check all aspects of a certain product’s or company’s
ethical impact. The three levels of the manifesto are arranged as a
pyramid, where human experience (note the using the word ‘human’
instead of ‘user’ or ‘consumer’) is just the top of the structure.
45 Ibid. chapter 6. What Are You Going to Do with This?

46 Ind.ie: Ethical Design Manifesto. ind.ie/ethical-design/ (accessed January 1, 2018)
21
Human rights Human effort Human experience
Technology that Technology that respects Technology that respects

respects human rights is human effort is functional, human experience is
decentralised, peer-to-peer, convenient, and reliable. beautiful, magical, and
zero-knowledge, end-to-end delightful.
encrypted, free and open
source, interoperable, It is thoughtful and
accessible, and sustainable. accommodating; not
It just works. It’s intuitive.
arrogant or demanding. It
It’s invisible. It recedes into
understands that you might
the background of your life.
be distracted or differently-
It respects and protects It gives you joy. It empowers
abled. It respects the
your civil liberties, reduces you with superpowers. It
limited time you have on
inequality, and benefits puts a smile on your face and
this planet.
democracy. makes your life better.
22
Although Balkan is mainly worried about the ownership of user’s
data, there are several components relevant to attention on all three
levels, which I have highlighted above. Balkan puts privacy and
ownership of information forward; he cites Shoshana Zuboff’s term
‘Surveillance Capitalism’,47 where hooking users to a digital product is
instrumental to ‘farm’ them for all the digital information they leave
behind. However, the main problem, according to James Williams (a
doctoral researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute and the cofounder
of the Time Well Spent movement) is exploiting psychological biases.
Digital products and services “move us toward goals that may or may
not align with our own [...] the core challenge of the Internet is that it
optimizes more for our impulses than our intentions” 48. This disparity
is the main concern of the Time Well Spent movement49, a “non-profit
organization dedicated to creating a humane future where technology
is in harmony with our well-being, our social values, and our democratic
principles” 50 founded by Tristan Harris and James Williams. The
movement is working to change the situation on three different levels
at the same time: empower users, so their choices pressure businesses
to change; empower designers to create better products and advocate
in their companies for change; and demand governmental pressure
for more humane business models and to advise for better policies on
user protection.51
47 Zuboff, S: “Big other: surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information

civilization”
Journal of Information Technology, 201. 30: 75. doi.org/10.1057/jit.2015.5 (accessed January 1,
2018)
48 Williams, J. Orwell, Huxley, Banksy. Rough Consensus, May 24, 2014, blogs.oii.ox.ac.uk/
roughconsensus/2014/05/orwell-huxley-banksy/ (accessed January 1, 2018)
49 Time Well Spent, 2017, timewellspent.io/ (accessed January 1, 2018)
50 Ibid.
51 This is also the reason why I conducted the interviews with designers from the different
walks of the field on these same 3 levels: the overall systemic possibilities for change,
the business model of clients and how a designer can influence in that area, and the
possibilities to make a difference through the design process and research.)
23
To see how the attention economy can threaten well-being,
social values, and democratic principles, all depending on several
variables, we need to revisit the conclusions of the first part of this
research: interferences eating up our limited cognitive capacity, and
our information consumption habits, to see how they play out in
the long term.
24
How is our mind affected?
Controlling the self and the phone
Recalling the introduction, where the dscout study52 was presented,
the researchers also asked users to give a quantitative estimate of
their interactions with their device, and whether they intended to
change their behavior after learning the real number. As it turned
out, participants were shocked by the numbers, and then displayed
little or no will to change; could participants have considered them
‘touches well spent’? According to the research done by the Time Well
Spent movement, the answer is ‘no’. Using data from Moment, an app
that tracks smartphone screen time per application, and combining it
with user’s self-reports on their level of happiness or regret after using
different applications, the results showed that there is an optimal daily
use when an app still leaves its users feeling happy, more than that is
countereffective 53–at least according to their own rating.
Before describing the particular cognitive consequences of the
attention economy, it is necessary to shortly address the issue of user’s
sense of control over their devices. Why did the empirical evidence
about how participants use their own smartphone make them feel
powerless instead of empowered?
Although one can try to describe the multifunctionality of
smartphones as the digital equivalent of a Swiss army knife, our
interactions and emotional relationship to these objects is quite
52 Winnick, Michael. Putting a Finger on Our Phone Obsession. Resources for Remote,
Qualitative and in-Context Research, blog.dscout.com/mobile-touches (accessed
January 1, 2018)
53 App Ratings, Time Well Spent. timewellspent.io/app-ratings/ (accessed January 1, 2018)
25
different. The latter is undoubtedly a tool under the (proficient
or clumsy) control of whoever is holding it, while the hierarchy of
command with the former is not so clear–for instance, our devices can
make us jump out of our skins with an unexpected loud ringtone. And
if we have been subjected to the methods of Hooked–which we most
probably have been, through one digital application or another–then
technology may reach out to us inside our minds, offering to deliver
information, which informavores 54 would have trouble forgoing, and
for good reason: “Information has value, and the right information has
enormous value.” 55 Still, when information is abundant and attention
is scarce, simply increasing our consumption does not automatically
guarantee that we will find just the right information. For one, the idea
that having access to “more information would automatically make us
all smarter as individuals or as a society” is a naïve notion.56 Secondly,
“[e]ven if we evaluate [our behavior with technology and information
intake] in terms of the goal of optimal foraging of information, it still
seems that our behavior is not optimal” 57. One of the main features of
digital media is the extremely low cost of accessibility, thus rendering
the continuing execution of information foraging inept; we design
54 Miller, George A. Informavores. The study of information: Interdisciplinary messages. 1984.

p. 111-113.
55 Neil Gaiman. Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming. The Guardian,
Oct 15, 2013. theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/15/neil-gaiman-future-libraries-reading-
daydreaming (accessed January 1, 2018)
56 The quote is from Ev Williams, founder of Twitter, who was prompted by this realisation
to call out a significant amount of tweets as “junk food”: pieces of content that are very
effective in grabbing our attention and rewarding the creators and shareholders of
a platform (Twitter, in his case), but otherwise has no inherent value. In order to halt
the creation of “junk food”, the feedback loop of likes, hearts, retweets, etc. should be
broken, as all of them are signs of other users (or bots) paying attention. However, until
the platform includes these functions, the content will be shaped by them, and the
applications will keep sending us notifications about them. Medium.com, Ev Williams’
new platform designed to generate thoughtful reading and writing, replaced the initial
heart-like with claps that can be of varying lengths to express the degree of satisfaction
with the article. Meek, Andy: Medium and Twitter founder: ‘We put junk food in front of them
and they eat it’, The Guardian, Apr 10 2016. theguardian.com/media/2016/apr/10/twitter-
ev-williams-medium-content-fast-food (accessed Jan 30, 2018)
World. MIT Press, 2016. p176.
26
environments with unprecedented access to information, but we do
not benefit from it or enjoy it as we intended to. According to James
Williams, the main reason behind this anomaly is to be found in how
technology creates habits or internal triggers which keep interfering
with our top-down goals: “If you get distracted by the same thing in
the same way every day, it adds up to a distracted week, distracted
months [...] it has the effect of making us forget about those [goals]
that we want to live by” 58. Or as Gazzaley and Rosen put it, “[E]veryday
media multitasking [...] is just a generous way of saying that we have
lost our awareness of what is necessary and what is simply reflexive
responding as though prodded by a sharp stick.” 59 Our habitually used
digital technologies, particularly smartphones, wear down our self-
control as the operating systems of our life: they use our finite psychic
energy for making micro-decisions about them throughout the day,
leaving less for setting and executing higher-level goals–which may
explain why using time spent as a design metric could erode well-
being, social values and democratic principles. No wonder participants
of the dscout study did not feel capable of changing their habits: even
when the attention grabbing methods are used for educational60
or other admittedly virtuous purposes, they somehow weaken our
general resolve.
Since continuing to discuss the question of control and power
would lead into the thorny realm of political and human rights, which
this thesis does not have the ambition to comprehensively discuss,
let’s return to the actual changes in the limits and capabilities of
our attention.
58 Williams, James interviewed by Gallagher, Brian. Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Your
Free Will. Nautilus, Sep 21, 2017. (accessed January 25, 2018) nautil.us/issue/52/the-hive/
modern-media-is-a-dos-attack-on-your-free-will
60 Tara García Mathewson: Can This Game-like App Help Students Do Better in School?
Nov 29, 2017. wired.com/story/can-this-game-like-app-help-students-do-better-in-
school (accessed 30 Jan 2018)
27
The trail of the spotlight
Imagine looking for a jar of raspberry jam in the dark pantry with a
flashlight. How would you start looking for it? Scan each shelf from left
to right? Jumping quickly between different points or waving around
the lamp would not show you the position of the objects relative to
one another, which is necessary for constructing a mental image of
the room; otherwise the discovery of the raspberry jam would be
left to chance. If the trail of the light was recorded by long-exposure
photography, scanning the shelves would show horizontal lines with
the occasional diversion, loosely mapping the structure of the room,
whereas the waving would draw an incoherent mess of focus points.
The more orderly movement would probably reveal the jam sooner.
28
Carrying further the strong visual metaphor of attention as a
flashlight enables us to express the feel of our current habits of media
and information consumption. Although looking for a specific object
or information in a finite space is the opposite of trying to navigate in
the information glut of our current media environment, the choices
of movement are analogous. We can randomly direct our focus
wherever chance (or rather skillful design) draws it, or move it with
intent during the occasional interruptions (direct the light at the floor
or at the slight peripheral movement in the corner). Problems arise
when we find our attention constantly drawn by the ever-renewing
and engaging technological environments: instead of resisting
these momentary impulses to find deeper engagement and possibly
enjoyment, “the current conditions of our modern, high-tech world
perpetuate [foraging] by offering us greater accessibility to feed [our]
instinctive drive and also via their influence on internal factors such
as boredom and anxiety.” 61 From the outside, this is often labelled
multitasking, which is in fact only frequent switching between objects
and their corresponding neural networks. We experience this when
our reading speed significantly slows down if we simultaneously
engage in instant messaging.62 We recall less of what we have read,
even if we don’t switch to the message.63 Instead of calmly moving
the flashlight of our attention to connect and organize the incoming
stimuli to each other and previous experiences, ‘all meaning gives way
to mere “information.” ’ 64
61 Ibid. p. 13.
62 Laura L. Bowman, Laura E. Levine, Bradley M. Waite, and Michael Gendron. 2010: “Can
students really multitask? An experimental study of instant messaging while reading”
Comput. Educ. 54, 4 (May 2010), 927-931. dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2009.09.024
63 D. S. Niederhauser, R. E. Reynolds, D. J. Salmen, and P. Skomolski: “The influence of
Cognitive Load on learning from Hypertext” Journal of Educational Computing Research, 23,
no. 3 (2000): 237-255., quoted in Nicholas Carr, The Shallows–What the Internet Is Doing to
Our Brains (New York: W. W. Norton&Co.), Chapter 7
64 Crawford, Matthew B. World Beyond Your Head : On Becoming an Individual in an Age of
Distraction. Ebook. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2015.
29
During frequent network switching, we have adapted to the
state of ‘continuous partial attention’ 65: our focus is mostly in transit
between two objects instead of being actually doubled to contain
multiple objects of focus. However, this adaptation comes with a price:
“we seem to have lost the ability to single task.” 66 The mere presence of
a smartphone reduces our cognitive capacity “by taxing the attentional
resources that reside at the core of both working memory capacity and
fluid intelligence.” 67 Sadly, being aware of these detrimental effects
and occasionally getting rid of the smartphone is not a psychologically
viable solution. The signs of emotional dependence of users include
“phantom pocket vibration syndrome, FOMO (fear of missing out),
and nomophobia (fear of being out of mobile phone contact)”.68
Though the symptoms are very specific to technology, being afraid
of the possibility of boredom, anxiety and loneliness is not. Applying
our focus exclusively on one and only one thing was always difficult
due to our susceptibility to interference by information. However,
an environment that resembles the spaceship in Wall-E 69 or even a
permanently connected phone interferes with our capability to focus
on a whole different magnitude than a library.
By now, we have established that the constantly increasing
information intake and self-interruption is not optimal for human
information consumption and integration, or, to put it more simply,
it will make us the opposite of smart and more productive. Giving
up some of the comfort provided by devices in order to control their
65 E. Rose: “Continuous Partial Attention: Reconsidering the Role of Online Learning in the
Age of Interruption” Educational Technology Magazine: The Magazine for Managers of Change
in Education 50, no. 4 (2010): 41–46., quoted in Gazzaley, Adam, and Larry D. Rosen. The
Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World. MIT Press, 2016. p. 111.
67 Adrian F. Ward, Kristen Duke, Ayelet Gneezy, And Maarten W. Bos: “Brain Drain: The
Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity.” JACR,
volume 2, number 2. Published online April 3, 2017. dx.doi.org/10.1086/691462 (accessed
January 1, 2018)
69 Stanton, Andrew, et al. WALL-E. Burbank, Calif: Walt Disney Home Entertainment, 2008.
30
own attention and mental effort is a price that Aral Balkan and other
politically motivated technologists are willing to pay to be “free as in
freedom”.70 For others, the price of being less productive and sharp
could be an incentive to resist the internal and external interruptions71.
However, rational reasons standing against an emotional pull
require constant monitoring of one’s own technological interactions
and a whole lot of self-control. On the level of personal well-being,
why should we preserve the capability to do one task at a time and
withstand moments of boredom? Can we say for sure that the humans
of Wall-E in their idle state of constant entertainment are not happy?
Optimal experience as happiness

Each person allocates his or her limited attention either by focusing
it intentionally like a beam of energy [...] or by diffusing it in desultory,
random movements. The shape and content of life depend on how
attention has been used.72
Defining happiness without getting tangled up in a cultural,

philosophical, political and sometimes religious debate is almost
impossible, and a task that will probably never be completed; still,
deciding whether a certain technology makes us happier requires a
pragmatic approach. Mihály Csíkszentmihályi’s book, Flow73, from
the quite young field of positive psychology, assimilates happiness
to having the most optimal experiences during our lifetime, “which is
as close as any of us can come to being happy” 74 and then exploring
what constitutes these experiences. Although his findings–based on
thousands of interviews, questionnaires and the Experience Sampling
70 Aral Balkan. Introducing Better. June 3, 2016. ind.ie/blog/better/ (accessed 30 Jan 2018)
71 See Cal Newport. Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. Little, Brown
Book Group, 2016
72 Csíkszentmihályi, Mihály. Flow. Ebook. HarperCollins 2008.
73 Ibid.
74 Ibid.
31
Method 75–conform to what is intuitively expected, they have not been
definitely proven by scientific, in this case psychological research. In the
results–coming from different parts of the world and different society
types–optimal experience was similarly described regardless of the
activity, the participant’s age, gender, location, culture, social class or
other variables, and the reasons for enjoying the activity were mostly
the same.76 Csíkszentmihályi also makes a clear distinction between
pleasure and optimal experience (or enjoyment). The former happens
when “information in consciousness says that expectations [...] have
been met” 77, e.g. eating stops the feeling of hunger, or we feel relaxed
by passively watching a familiar movie. Enjoyment goes beyond what
is expected to achieve a “sense of novelty, of accomplishment.” 78 Sports,
art, games and some other activities lend themselves easier to the
optimal experience, but it is not exclusive to them. Many participants
used the term flow for how they felt during these moments, which
is how the theory later became popularised. The word is sometimes
misused by applying only one or a few of the findings, or mystified
as a miraculous experience, when the requirements, though far from
easy, are nothing extravagant. They are not binary, achieving them
to any measure enables us to experience flow in proportion to how
well we fulfilled the criteria; most of them define a behavior of our
attentional capacities.
First, the experience usually occurs when we confront tasks we

have a chance of completing. Second, we must be able to concentrate
on what we are doing. Third and fourth, the concentration is usually
possible because the task undertaken has clear goals and provides
immediate feedback. Fifth, one acts with a deep but effortless
75 The Experience Sampling Method consists of a pager prompting the participant 8
times a day to answer some questions about their current activity. Larson, R., &
Csíkszentmihályi, M: “The Experience Sampling Method” New Directions for Methodology
of Social & Behavioral Science, 15, 1983. p. 41-56.
76 Csíkszentmihályi, Mihaly. Flow. Ebook. HarperCollins 2008.
77 Ibid.
78 Ibid.
32
involvement that removes from awareness the worries and
frustrations of everyday life. Sixth, enjoyable experiences allow people
to exercise a sense of control over their actions. Seventh, concern
for the self disappears, yet paradoxically the sense of self emerges
stronger after the flow experience is over. Finally, the sense of the
duration of time is altered; hours pass by in minutes, and minutes can
stretch out to seem like hours.79 (emphasis by me)
When reviewing the emphasized parts one by one, the first and
glaring difference between optimal experience and pleasure is
the necessity to confront a task; thus it is harder to attain as we can
“experience pleasure without any investment of psychic energy,
whereas enjoyment happens only as a result of unusual investments
of attention”. If someone does invest psychic energy and fully pays
attention, she can lose herself in the activity, and emerge with “a
stronger, more confident self, because more of their psychic energy
has been invested successfully in goals they themselves had chosen
to pursue.” Pleasure “helps to maintain order, but by itself cannot
create new order in consciousness.” What Csíkszentmihályi calls
ordered consciousness is “a struggle for establishing control over
attention”, not against, but “for the self”. Self-control here stands
not for controlling oneself and sticking to the top-down goals with
gritted teeth (although sometimes it feels like that) against internal
and external bottom-up stimuli, but to control one’s own flashlight of
attention, not because it’s virtuous, but because it is “more enjoyable,
and [...] it builds the self-confidence that allows us to develop skills.” 80
During an optimal experience, top-down and bottom-up goals merge
into one single drive. “When the information that keeps coming into
awareness is congruent with goals, psychic energy flows effortlessly.” 81
However, when an incoming information disrupts our goal enactment,
it also disturbs the order in our consciousness and rebuilds the divide
79 Ibid
80 Ibid.
81 Ibid.
33
between bottom-up and top-down goals. To constantly live in flow
is impossible, but creating very little of it makes for a dreary life.
“Prolonged experiences of [unordered consciousness] can weaken
the self to the point that it is no longer able to invest attention and
pursue its goals.” 82 Transferring the control over our attention and
letting in a large number of interferences damages the top-down goal-
setting capabilities.
Fully attending to any goal, task or object is really like an investment–
it takes some time to reap the rewards. If the initial investment of time
and attention does not happen, the task (anything from painting to
flossing) that someone skilled in that activity thoroughly enjoys, seems
boring to others. The person who can achieve the optimal experience
using a certain skill has already “trained their attention to process
signals that otherwise would pass unnoticed.” 83 This applies to tiny
chores (e.g. flossing) as well: improving it every day is more fun than
hating it every day, transforming it from routine to a possible ritual.84
The skilled person sees well-organized information where others see
chaos or nothing, and the two latter do not stand much of a chance
against instantly accessible and gratifying information.
Remembering the amount of daily interactions with the
smartphone and recalling the simultaneous use of screens and the
susceptibility for (self-)interferencing, it is easy to comprehend how
digital products can disrupt an optimal experience by derailing
the intended trail of our focus. Smartphones alone can generate
anxiety, even when they are not present. “Out of sight was clearly
82 Ibid.
83 Ibid.
84 The available benefits stemming from attentiveness to mechanical activities is
described well in the book of Sennett, Richard: The Craftsman. Ebook. 2008, Penguin
Books, London. “At its higher reaches, technique is no longer a mechanical activity;
people can feel fully and think deeply what they are doing once they do it well.” With
full focus, almost any activity can be an opportunity to order our consciousness, still, it is
exhausting to try this with every activity.
34
not out of mind” 85, making it impossible for their users to sustain full
concentration. Distractions and interruptions (even internal ones)
snap us out of optimal experiences; exploiting the susceptibility to
interferences essentially equals to ruining the free flow of psychic
energy or attention.
What is a little less evident is how digital interferences and hooks
prevent an experience from becoming optimal in the first place.
According to a study cited at the beginning, the second most reported
reason for picking up the phone is (intellectual or emotional86)
boredom,87 which has an important role: “boredom will motivate the
pursuit of new goals as the intensity of the current experience fades” 88.
These moments without action are small windows of opportunity
when we can find a new task or goal. “By motivating desire for change
from the current state, boredom increases opportunities to attain
social, cognitive, emotional and experiential stimulation that could
have been missed.” 89 If these uncomfortable seconds of micro-decision
are exploited by the design patterns of products that thrive in the
attention economy and provide a seemingly infinite amount of more
satisfying information, then giving our full and undivided attention to
a challenging task will require truly extraordinary feats of self-control
(the gritted teeth kind). After all, as M. Crawford says,“[w]hat sort of
85 Cheever, Nancy A., Larry D. Rosen, L. Mark Carrier, and Amber Chavez: “Out of Sight
Is Not Out of Mind: The Impact of Restricting Wireless Mobile Device Use on Anxiety
Levels among Low, Moderate and High Users.” Computers in Human Behavior, 37, August
2014, 290–97. Quoted in Gazzaley, Adam, and Larry D. Rosen. The Distracted Mind: Ancient
Brains in a High-Tech World. MIT Press, 2016. p. 173.
86 “[T]he reason behind the constant task switching is a desire to feed emotional needs—
often by switching from school work to entertainment or social communication—rather
than cognitive or intellectual needs.“ Gazzaley, Adam, and Larry D. Rosen. The Distracted
Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World. MIT Press, 2016. p. 116., quoting Z. Wang and J. M.
Tchernev, “The Myth of Media Multitasking: Reciprocal Dynamics of Media Multitasking,
Personal Needs, and Gratifications,” Journal of Communication 62, no. 3 (2012) p. 493–513.
87 Pew Research Center. The Smartphone Difference. April, 2015. pewinternet.
88 Bench, Shane W., and Heather C. Lench. “On the Function of Boredom”. Behavioral
Sciences 3.3 (2013): 459–472. PMC. Web. (accessed January 23, 2018)
35
outlier would you have to be, what sort of freak of self-control, to resist
those well-engineered cultural marshmallows?” 90 Literal or figurative
marshmallows do not measure up to the optimal experience, but
quite successfully compete for the same limited time and attention.
Products hooking our attention most likely deprive us of possibly
entering the flow state, which, similarly to how daily distractions
add up to distracted weeks and months, turn into extended periods
of attentional underinvestment, of stunted self-development and
enjoyment.91 While losing boredom 92 is not something to immediately
regret, by losing the motivation to pursue new goals, we risks gaining
less self-confidence, less meaning and less time well spent in our lives.
“Everything we experience—joy or pain, interest or boredom—
is represented in the mind as information.” 93 By carrying around a
constantly connected device in our pocket and by filling the spaces
around us with ever-renewing and engaging technological media
that gives us more information and others an access to our attention,
we are–indirectly and inadvertently–sabotaging our capacity to
freely invest our psychic energy and experience true enjoyment. As
Csíkszentmihályi states: “If we are able to control [the incoming flow
of] information, we can decide what our lives will be like.” 94
90 Crawford, Matthew B. World Beyond Your Head : On Becoming an Individual in an Age of

Distraction. Ebook. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2015.
92 Isn’t it ironic when we don’t find anything interesting in our environment because we
did not develop the skills to perceive the little signals, thus boredom actually increases?
But let’s not go down that rabbit hole.
93 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow. Ebook. HarperCollins 2008.
94 Ibid.
36
Getting to attentive design
Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it
neutral.95
One thing about design and technology that gives hope (and
sometimes causes fear) is that being made by people, it can also be
corrected by them (with certain caveats). Still, if the number of daily
active users amounts to the billions,96 optimism requires a stretch
of the imagination. If we recall Collingridge’s statement: “when
change is easy, the need for it cannot be foreseen; when the need for
change is apparent, change has become expensive, difficult and time
consuming” 97, then the problems of the attention economy clearly fall
in the latter category.
The struggle to organise and deliver information through design

and the tension between private economic interests and humanist
goals was already present during the 1960s for graphic designers and
photographers, particularly in Britain. The First Things First Manifesto98,
written by Ken Garland and signed by many others, articulated how
“the greatest time and effort of those working in the advertising
95 Kranzberg, Melvin. Technology and History: “Kranzberg’s Laws”. Technology and Culture 27,
no. 3 (1986): 544-60. doi:10.2307/3105385.
96 Facebook, Annual reports, 2016. investor.fb.com/financials/?section=annualreports
97 David Collingridge. The Control of Technology. NY, St. Martin’s Press, 1980
98 Ken Garland. First Things first manifesto. 1964, The Guardian. designishistory.com/1960/
first-things-first/ (accessed January 8, 2018)
37
industry are wasted on [...] trivial purposes.” 99
The suggestion
addressed to their designer audience was to concentrate their effort
and skills on “education and public service tasks that promoted the
betterment of society” 100 without asking for the unrealistic measure
of totally abandoning consumer advertising. The designers neither
accused their clients of bad intentions, nor the public of being
gullible. Though the scale of information overload in 1964 was far
from ours, the manifesto started the conversation about the power
and responsibility of designing information and communication as
attention became a scarcity.
In order to find a way out and forward into a future where we
have better options than putting up with the psychological damage
described above or cutting ourselves off from all digital information
sources, the current digital media ecosystem needs corrections,
revisions (and sometimes an overhaul) on all levels. Many designers
work on some part of this arduous task; their tools range from small
everyday interaction design decisions to full-time activism and
research. I have tried to gather and organize a collection from books,
articles, public talks and some interviews I conducted with designers
with diverse career routes (freelancing, agency, large corporations),
who are committed in one way or another to affecting change. While
not all of them are necessarily involved with the question of attention,
they all try to design ethically, considering long-term effects, and
values expressed in qualitative goals next to financial earnings. A
comprehensive report and a short profile about each designer is
included in the appendix; the key points will be presented below in the
relevant solution space.
99 Ibid.
100 Design Is History: The First Things First Manifesto. designishistory.com/1960/first-
things-first/ (accessed January 8, 2018)
38
High-level ideas: manifestos, regulation,
legislation
[Giant IT platform companies] claim they are merely distributing

information. But the fact that they are near- monopoly distributors
makes them public utilities and should subject them to more stringent
regulations, aimed at preserving competition, innovation, and fair and
open universal access.101
One reason that makes designers and engineers optimistic about

digital products is the possibility of having a quick and huge impact on
a large audience. What many of them fail to clarify is the precise kind
of impact they want to make (which would be the first step towards
taking responsibility). Would it be beneficial, or is it better to step back
and have no impact at all? Are designers themselves capable to assess
all the consequences and make the right choice? Is outside regulation
necessary? These are some of the questions that I try to review in this
section through the interviews and other sources.
Attempted answers to these questions are often laid out in
manifestos102 such as ind.ie’s Ethical Design Manifesto, Pamela Pavliscak’s
Positive Design Manifesto103, design&human’s104 principles and values,
and the Time Well Spent movement’s texts, all of them complemented
101 George Soros: “Remarks delivered at the World Economic Forum” Jan 25, 2018.
georgesoros.com/2018/01/25/remarks-delivered-at-the-world-economic-forum/
102 This research by no means claims to have a complete overview of these kinds of
documents and writings but rather wishes to compare the ones already presented in
Chapter 2.
103 Pavliscak, Pamela: “A positive design manifesto” Soundingbox.com Mar 12, 2015.
soundingbox.com/a-positive-design-manifesto (accessed January 30, 2018)
104 Design&Human. designandhuman.com (accessed January 30, 2018)
39
by conference talks. Although most of them do not point to specific
design solutions, they provide a useful starting point for envisioning a
different ecology of attention.105
Whereas the Ethical Design Manifesto tries to cover all aspects from
technology, economy and design, the Positive Design Manifesto focuses
only on the top part of the pyramid (human experience) and gives a
set of principles relevant to that. ‘Positive design’ is about “creating
possibilities” 106 by prioritizing autonomy (and later mastery), trust,
creativity, connection or community, and meaning. Comparing these
qualities with the requirements of ‘optimal experience’, we find many
common elements: achieving a goal is linked to autonomy or a sense of
control; the disappearing concern for the self implies trusting oneself
and the environment; choosing between different possible next steps
during flow is essential for creativity; and our invested engagement in
a certain task is due to its perceived meaning.
Another declaration of values are the principles and of
design&human107, Geoffrey Dorne’s company. They originate mainly
from user-centered design108, which underwent a significant change
from its first appearance. At its start, it mostly meant taking users
105 Scholars, e.g. Yves Citton (Yves Citton. Pour une écologie de l’attention. Le Seuil, 2014.) and
Roberto Casati (Roberto Casati. Contro il colonialismo digitale. Ebook. Gius. Laterza & Figli,
2014.), as well as the authors of The Distracted Mind also provide insights and suggestions,
however for the sake of brevity (and relevance, occasionally), and to stay in the realm of
design, we will only view the solution space of designers.)
106 Pavliscak, Pamela: “A positive design manifesto” Soundingbox.com Mar 12, 2015.
soundingbox.com/a-positive-design-manifesto (accessed January 30, 2018)
107 The principles are as follows:
Any design product is an act with meanings and intentions.
Form is the result of its product.
Innovation is social, not technological.
Design is a responsible and ethical work.
A product must be understood by its user, not the opposite.
Design can be poetic and human only if it is free and based on truth.
Design is to everyone’s attention whereas it’s open to all.
A designer shall guide its work with ethics and shall refuse to do some things.
In a human perspective, all technological possibilities aren’t to be done.
Design is human-centered before being product-centered.
108 Norman, Donald A., and Stephen W. Draper: “User centered design” New Perspectives on
Human-Computer Interaction, 1986.
40
into account while designing technology; now it is a complex field
on how to prioritize and harmonize various needs (messaging, data
collection) for different groups (clients, users, customers, patients, etc)
with sometimes opposing interests. Dorne’s preference for the term
‘human’ to ‘user’ follows Don Norman, who originally popularized the
concept of user-centered design, but changed the wording in a later
edition109. Design&human’s stance also echoes the sentiment of the First
Things First Manifesto when it calls for designers to work in a socially
responsible way and utilize their skills for meaningful contribution. His
approach, unlike the Positive Design Manifesto, is not directly related to
the topic of attention; the link comes from charging the business model
of companies thriving in the attention economy with being unethical.
Imposing rules in the form of manifestos or principles on one’s own

professional practice is one thing, advocating to regulate everyone
else’s is quite another. Before trying to enact policies and legislation,
there are softer tools against ‘inattentive designs’ or unethical business
models more generally. Geoffrey Dorne’s suggestions include advising
companies to pursue success with a different, ethical business model,
for example by emulating the ‘bio’ or ‘fair trade’ labels for digital
products. Still, discussing the possibilities and limits of legislation
is necessary due to its growing scope in protecting digital privacy 110
(which is closely linked to our subject, as more time spent likely equals
more user data).
One striking difference between regulating the ownership of data
or attention is that the latter is an intangible and elusive psychological
function translated by behavioral measurements with varying degrees
of success, while the former consists of very real numbers and text.
This subtle, but fundamental difference may at least partly account for
109 User-centered design in Donald A. Norman. The Design of Everyday Things. 1988, Basic
Books, New York; human-centered design in Donald A. Norman. The Design of Everyday
Things. Ebook. 2013, Basic Books, New York.
110 One example is the cookie-consent form required to be displayed on sites accessed
from the European Commission. “Cookies”. Sep 21, 2016. ec.europa.eu/ipg/basics/legal/
cookies/index_en.htm#section_2 (accessed January 30, 2018)
41
the varying, sometimes contradictory answers in the five interviews
conducted for this research. Ryan Rumsey, whose career path leads
through large enterprises like Apple and Nestlé, would take the quite
liberal but sharp regulations for gambling as a possible model. Darja
Gartner and Jérémie Fontana, who work at digital design agencies,
put slightly more emphasis on regulations. And we might be seeing
more regulations in the future, according to Pamela Pavliscak, as the
critique of large digital companies is piling up, though the real benefits
remain uncertain. As the founder of Change Sciences, an “insights
and innovation firm”,111 she provides a more detailed description of
possible outcomes, e.g. how committing to certain values or goals in
the abstract can have surprising downsides: a lower-level designer
could take the repercussions for a decision coming from the top; or, like
doctors and lawyers, designers and engineers will have to start carrying
malpractice insurance after taking some technology-paraphrased
version of the Hippocratic Oath. Still, professional codes of ethics are
important to her, especially when creating a piece of technology which
does not work transparently, e.g. artificial intelligence.
After going through several manifestos and the individual

answers on the powerful tools of regulation, the results show varying
degrees of personal optimism; also, in the aforementioned cases,
the confidence in a designer’s own convictions are mostly inversely
proportional to their legal expertise. Laws, rules and other legal
boundaries on the conceptual level of design and engineering prove
to be necessary, but insufficient to make the psychological damage of
attention disappear. It is unclear how to inscribe the ethics of attention
in legal terms: it is still very much a work-in-progress as the trade-
offs between distraction and entertainment remain unclear; even
if it would be somehow condensed into policies and rules, the real
impact is unpredictable; and even if it would have the intended effect,
111 Change Sciences. changesciences.com (accessed Jan 30, 2018)

42
it still requires to be applied on a daily basis. Thus we have zoomed
in to a smaller, but probably more significant scale: the feasibility of
attention-conscious design in everyday practice.
Everyday business struggles

The discussions happening at companies and agencies probably
have a more immediate impact on minimizing the negative effects
of the attention economy than conferences and manifestos, as they
have the power to change what is ‘business as usual’. However, since
these conversations take place behind closed doors, often under
non-disclosure agreements, the results are also less transparent or
trackable. One can rely mostly on personal examples and anecdotes
from blogs and interviews, which do provide some valuable insights.
All of the interviewed designers mentioned keeping to a set of
individual rules, such as drawing the line and saying no in specific cases
(even if the same rules would be difficult to apply as legislations). Some
do not even get started on projects, others negotiate and navigate
daily with only few upfront refusals, and in one case it appears possible
to select a group of clients whose requests do not generate conflicts
between good design and good business.
Geoffrey Dorne, who outputs his guiding principles not only on
the website of design&human but on his blog 112, in his classes and his
conference talks, belongs in the first category. Freelancing enables him
to turn down unethical proposals and to refuse more than half of all
received projects, and mainly, but not exclusively, working with NGO-s
and social enterprises. Educating not only other designers but clients,
companies and users is also a large part of his work.
Public communication (as opposed to high-stakes meetings) is
necessary and effective also for Darja Gartner and Jérémie Fontana:
organizing a talk or event for possible future clients about design
112 Dorne, Geoffrey. “Graphisme&Interactivité”, graphism.fr (accessed February 5, 2018)
43
ethics is easier than having the same conversation over the contract.
Turning down a project is only a last resort after long negotiations.
(Nevertheless there are design solutions, business models and a
few industries they refuse to work for, which are determined by the
agency’s ethical code.) There is pressure on both the agency’s and the
client’s side: the designers refusing to produce certain design patterns
or interactions can result in losing the project. There are times when
the client would be open to prioritizing long-term outcomes, but the
pressure to deliver immediate results also on their side derails good
intentions, pulling down the agency with them as well. In these cases,
it may still help to communicate ethical choices as profitable over time
by finding an argument or a different success metric; another effective
persuasion technique is using analogies. Explaining user research as
architectural planning (where walls are much harder to move after
being built than on the blueprints) and user testing as a car crash test
(the engineering is probably fine, but it’s still necessary) can help.
Nevertheless if the clients have not reflected on the deeper goals,
don’t intend to produce added value besides the profit, and may have
already selected a quantitative metric before approaching the design
firm, the chance to sell them qualitative research–which would enable
to evaluate the product’s impact on our attentional capacities, or any
long-term effect or ethical concern–is slim.
Despite the reasonable assumption that larger enterprises, like
Apple and Nestlé–previous workplaces of Ryan Rumsey–, would be
able to support the timeframe and costs of measuring complex notions
of success, persuading them of the necessity of qualitative research is
not any easier than inside a small or mid-sized agency. Ryan Rumsey
is used to saying no upfront, negotiating during his time at a company
and quitting if that is the only option to preserve his personal integrity.
When he is advocating a certain value or qualitative measures in
a current position, one of his tools is to delegate the responsibility of
ethics to individuals or work teams instead of a committee, as the latter
usually cannot claim real ownership of the positive or negative impact.
44
He also finds that well-communicated design research can change
senior-level decisions and avoid coming to a breakpoint (although
saying ‘no’ can put the willingness of the company to test). Though all
this effort sometimes amounts solely for design to being considered
as a problem-solving domain and not an exclusively aesthetic one,
Rumsey (unlike Dorne) does not consider non-profits to be easier
clients, as “they are still governed by money or time.”
Pamela Pavliscak’s account of ‘business as usual’ at Change

Sciences, her own firm, paints a rather optimistic picture compared to
the previous ones, which could be explained by the studio’s focus on
designing for a humane future of technology. Although she is prepared
to refuse certain design solutions, she could not recall a time when
she had to do so. Without naming specific companies, she explained
that her clients are a self-selecting group from all over the spectrum,
all concerned with long-term customer relationships (although not
particularly with the principles of the Positive Design Manifesto or ethical
design in general), so convincing them about qualitative research
is usually superfluous–that is probably what they came for. Many
of them come from more traditional industries with established
organizations, where planning for 5 or 10 years is not unusual, unlike
some purely technological companies who face so much pressure to
grab user’s attention right now; at least she hasn’t encountered among
her clients a startup with such long vision.113
Pavliscak’s efforts go towards persuading companies to look at
unfamiliar models–including inventive metrics–rather than those
they are used to, occasionally surprising her clients. She strongly
believes in the personal agency of designers, developers, researchers
or consultants to facilitate change, as top-down micromanagement is,
113 The details on the construction of such a group of clients, quite understandably,
remained a mystery even after the interview.
45
luckily, often missing. It’s “just a matter of figuring out better ways”.
Thus an extensive, but by no means exhaustive collection of these
better ways will constitute the next and last part of this research.
Designer’s tools and solutions

We’re not addicted to devices, we’re addicted to the information
that flows through them. I wonder how long you would be happy in
your happy place without any information from the outside world.114
Agreeing with Tea Uglow, a designer at Google’s Creative Park in

Sydney, on this particular point is as easy as yearning for the utopian
vision presented in her talk, “An Internet without screens might look like
this” 115. The surfaces of this concept are dominated by wood, rocks and
other natural materials, while containing all the ‘magic’ of technology–
the equivalent of comparing the current environment of workplaces
and homes to a vacation spot. However, in the unlikely case that,
starting tomorrow, well-informed consumers or forward-thinking
companies solely demand technological solutions with no significant
drawbacks on our cognitive capacities, the day after tomorrow would
not immediately morph into the ‘happy place’ of our daydreaming.
How could the design process change in order to deliver
information without distraction or interruption? Even when all external
circumstances align, it is not obvious how to figure in attention during
the design process; not just the concepts and norms for treating the
topic of attention, but existing practices or agreed upon interfaces and
solutions are missing, which, in Pamela Pavliscak’s opinion, is precisely
what is called for: “in design, we need really thorough, small, concrete
steps to follow, and we rely on best practices and conventions”.
114 Tea Uglow: “An Internet Without Screens Might Look Like This”. TED Talk. May 2015. ted.
com/talks/tom_uglow_an_internet_without_screens_might_look_like_this (accessed
January 30, 2018)
115 ibid.
46
Uglow also presented a few interesting and lovable projects,
including one in collaboration with the (now closed) BERG studio, that
do realize her vision; still, these designs had a specific context: a group
of users, like mental health patients, or a specific occasion, like a large
event.116 Analyzing the merits and limits of other connected products
of BERG, e.g. Little Printer (the most famous of them), or other projects
sadly exceeds the limits of this research.
From the group designers interviewed for this thesis, relying on trial
and error to come up with an original or even poetic solution (backed
up by ethnographic observation) is also the preferred approach of
Geoffrey Dorne; the classic production flow of wireframes, visual
designs and user testing stays the same for all success metric or
requirement. However, the freedom and time required for such a
process is generally not available to most designers–as one should
suspect after reading the previous sections–which does not mean
that using qualitative research and creating new design patterns
or even interfaces is the privilege of freelancers or independent
researcher / designers.
Starting small, let’s see how a designer can experiment in modest

ways, e.g. to come up with a more inclusive, ‘holistic’ way of tracking
attention that conveys more than time spent, number of visitors or
bounce rate, as moving forward probably won’t mean relinquishing
attention measures in a business context. In this process, previous
attempts to numerically express an emotion or quality could be
an inspiration.
116 Another fitting example is The Screenless Office, an artistic proposition initiated by
Brendan Howell: remain as connected as current workplaces are, but produce and
consume information solely on paper. The tools (printers, barcode scanners, etc.) exist,
but this alternative vision–excluding Microsoft, Apple and several other large hardware
companies that produce similar screen-centered objects–is even hard to envision.
“These interfaces have become so embedded in our conception of reality that we now
have a crisis of the imagination, where it is difficult to even think of anything different.”
The Screenless Office. screenl.es/diversity.html (accessed September 14, 2017)
47
A specific example of using an emotive value as a success factor
for Jérémie Fontana was trying to measure trust for legal or finance
projects, where clients had to upload sensitive documents. These
occasions are nevertheless rare, so neither he or Darja Gartner could
claim having an identifiable formalized process for these cases (though
the agency where Gartner works has a quite strict design flow). The
classic design research tools (e.g. user journey, persona, empathy map)
can facilitate a deeper understanding, but it’s hard to evaluate whether
a long-term goal has been indeed achieved or not, if the agency can
follow a project only for a short period and often does not have access
to the client’s analytics.
For both Pamela Pavliscak and Ryan Rumsey, picking what to

measure is pivotal before deciding how to measure it (and they
have more freedom to do so than an average agency, for different
reasons). The selection of the principles for the Positive Design Manifesto
(autonomy/mastery, trust, creativity, connection/community,
meaning) is an appropriate example. Pavliscak gathered the
relevant academic research, including the work of Martin Seligman,
a co-founder of positive psychology with Csíkszentmihályi117, and
collected data about people’s high and low points with technology
with diary studies, followed by ethnographic interviews, where some
patterns emerged. One example is how creating personal meaning
from the digital interactions (crafting the perfect playlist, or making
a great post for social media, or coming up with a beautiful photo
on Instagram) brought more joy and satisfaction than an easy and
frictionless user experience.
Larger enterprises, even while demanding quick results, have the
advantage of tracking metrics and iterating on a product over a long
period, and their decisions are doubly important as smaller companies
often follow their lead. In Rumsey’s practice, each request started
117 Seligman M.E.P., Csíkszentmihályi M.: “Positive Psychology: An Introduction” Flow and
the Foundations of Positive Psychology. 2014, Springer, Dordrecht
48
with defining a successful outcome with the other team, colleague
or executive coming to them. Would great design in that case equal
increased revenue, or something that moves you emotionally?
Depending on quantitative or qualitative aspect of the goal, the
time divided between specific activities changes, but the overall
design process stays the same. His team was constantly performing
qualitative research with a “sense of pragmatism” during a few weeks’
time for each project in order to produce insights, even though
“qualitative analysis requires more human hours.” In order to support
the increase in costs (or any change in general), Rumsey had to get
support from someone more senior, or gradually gain footing among
the different teams; in order to achieve this, he sometimes resorted to
communication tricks and quantifying whatever they were trying to
improve, often with the method of the ‘perceived value scorecard’, a
scale of 1 to 5 of basically anything that can’t be directly measured.
The ‘perceived value scorecard’ is merely a way to get people to

listen. And the only way I can get them to listen is almost trick them
instead of talking about qualitative research. ‘Well, your adoption
is 2 out of 5.’ ‘What? I wanna improve that!’ ‘Well, here’s how you
can do that.’
The qualitative research resulting in this score could come from

diary studies, observations, interviews, which were then rolled into a
single number. If their colleagues or the management wanted to get
into the detailed research, it was available, but more often than not
they did not mind.
For those of us who do mind what constitutes such a number, out
of suspicion or curiosity about whether there is a right way to quantify
trust, creativity or focus, the short answer is: no, there is no single
correct method, but it is worth trying. Pamela Pavliscak also devotes
quite a lot of energy to new ways of research in order to see how the
criteria of the Positive Design Manifesto can be satisfied in a client project.
49
“[We] experiment out loud to try to measure some of these things [...]
and I think we’re on the right track.” At the same time, she does not
think that quantifying everything is necessarily the best approach: “you
can’t put a number on an emotion, or on the nature of the relationship
or long-term values, [it’s] just kind of a stand-in or shorthand for
something that you can get started with, looking at, paying attention
to... I’m not sure if quantifying is ideal [...] for a lot of these things but
it does get organizations to pay attention, and it gives a way to look
at that goal.” Whereas Rumsey’s team appears to use quantification
mainly as a sales strategy, Pavliscak seems to be equally motivated to
gain a better understanding and tracking of emotive values.
Change Science’s experiments are made available in SoundingBox,
which could be defined as a user research agency that goes beyond
simple usability to compare the whole human experiences of
websites, providing both qualitative and quantitative results; in a
demo screenshot, effort, flow and connection were displayed with
a percentage value.118 The process of arriving to a single number, as
described in the interview, relies on “asking and tweaking questions
to gather meaningful answers over simple observation” (unlike Dorne)
to create a full picture: “if we’re only observing and trying to articulate
the story of the people ourselves, we’re missing out on their story and
how they’re making meaning and coherence.” Gathering the necessary
information is inspired also by how governments are tracking
healthcare, education or other aspects of well-being, which are also
constantly revised.
What happens after comprehensive data about attention, trust

or meaning have been gathered? Does this data directly orient us
towards satisfactory interfaces, interactions or design patterns?
Apart from excluding already well-documented dark patterns119, not
118 Soundingbox: “Services.” soundingbox.com/services (accessed January 22, 2018)
119 A collection of these and how to substitute them with ‘white patterns’ can be found
in Trine Falbe, Kim Andersen and Martin Michael Frederiksen. White Hat UX. Ebook.
Smashing Magazine, Denmark, 2017. or at darkpatterns.org (especially under the Hall of
50
really, not even for Pavliscak. The research of design solutions includes
cataloging positive patterns for attention: “It’s something we all need
to do.” In Pavliscak’s opinion, entirely new kinds of interaction (e.g.
conversational interfaces, wearables, or the overall vision presented
by Tea Uglow) are not necessarily going to ease our cognitive load by
being more attentive.
Where else can we find research backed design patterns that
positively impact our attentional capacities? An article by Joe Edelman,
a former designer of the couchsurfing.com120 platform and a current
collaborator of the Time Well Spent movement, suggests redesigning
menus and enhancing them with circumstantial information. Menu
options currently present themselves as the only possible solutions for
the problem that made us open the menu the first place, when in fact it
is a rather constrained and biased selection of options; it might contain
the solution when the user’s needs and the creator’s intentions are
actually aligned. To spot the misalignment and think of other possible
activities “may require that options listings be augmented with likely
time costs, likely money costs, the unlikelihood of various hoped-for
outcomes, the likelihood of unhoped-for outcomes, whether there
are less-costly or better-success-rate options for similar outcomes” 121.
“In order to display these kinds of cues122, we’d need to build giant
database about people, about their choices, and about the outcomes
of those choices.” 123 Edelman’s proposal clearly states that the database
should be public, hoping for an outcome that “would reshape the
media ecosystem and incentives for business.” 124 While the creation
Shame menu)
120 Couchsurfing. couchsurfing.com (accessed January 30, 2018)
121 Edelman, Joe: Choicemaking and the Interface. 2014. nxhx.org/Choicemaking (accessed
January 30, 2018).
122 How these augmented menus might work in practice, as seen in the article’s
illustrations, is the browser asking the user why she is visiting facebook.com (for a quick
break, for organizing an event), color-coding whether that is a reasonable expectation
(red, green, red), and showing alternatives for a different activity (e.g. sunshine).
123 Edelman, Joe: Choicemaking and the Interface. 2014. nxhx.org/Choicemaking (accessed
January 30, 2018).
124 Ibid.
51
of the database is clearly valuable, and hindering a habit could help
breaking the cycle described in Hooked, complicating each interaction
with more decision-making is not attentive design; it merely adds
another layer of interference (which, granted, might relegate some
interruptions into mere distractions). Such an overly complex interface
is also very far from Uglow’s utopia of having a “happy place filled with
the information we love that feels as natural and as simple as switching
on a lightbulb” 125.
Other tweaks of existing softwares, for example widgets,
extensions, extra information in the browser to nudge us, block certain
sites, measure and inform about the time spent, number of visits,
etc. do empower the user in the present moment, but these band-
aids take away time and effort from what should be the main goal:
designing interfaces and interactions that do not require an added
layer of protection to stay psychologically harmless. Games that
promise to improve our cognitive capacities126 or digital detox camps
are also substitutes, displacing the blame and responsibility on the
users of digital product.127 Should we really have to run away from the
technology that we ourselves created and bought?
Before giving up hope on bridging the present and the desired

future of attentive design or merely waiting for the continuation of
Pavliscak’s and other’s investigations and experimentations, there
125 Tea Uglow: “An Internet Without Screens Might Look Like This”. TED Talk. May 2015.
ted.com/talks/tom_uglow_an_internet_without_screens_might_look_like_this
World. MIT Press, 2016. p190
127 While technology prompts some addictive behaviors, it is not a substance that can
and should be fully given up. “What’s wrong with the digital detox is that it [...] focuses
on the demand side of digital addiction. We also need to talk about supply.” Beattie,
Alex: What’s Wrong With The Digital Detox? Medium.com, 19/12/2016 medium.com/@
amdbeattie/whats-wrong-with-the-digital-detox-5bf0e7d4029f (accessed January 29,
2018)
52
is (at least) one set of principles with concrete design suggestions128
that can be used right now for attentive design. Amber Case’s book
titled Calm Technology–building on Mark Weiser’s already mentioned
article, The Coming age of calm technology 129 –presents general rules and
specific examples for bringing calm design to life. The book follows up
on the technological changes since the writing of the original article by
updating some of the ideas and providing examples and an evaluation
tool. The principles are, as follows (the parts of particular relevance for
attentive design are highlighted):
I. Technology should require the smallest possible amount of

attention.
II. Technology should inform and create calm.
III. Technology should make use of the periphery.
IV. Technology should amplify the best of technology and the best of
humanity.
V. Technology can communicate, but doesn’t need to speak.
VI. Technology should work even when it fails.
VII. The right amount of technology is the minimum needed to
solve the problem.
VIII. Technology should respect social norms.130
The relevance of most of these rules for attentive design is quite

evident. Calm communication patterns are necessary to reach a state
of deep focus or to keep technology from interrupting social situations.
Although Case avoids discussing both the economic incentives to
128 Golden Krishna’s book, The Best Interface is No Interface, also presents some valuable
examples. Krishna, Golden. The Best Interface Is No Interface. The Simple Path to Brilliant
Technology. Ebook. New Riders, 2015.
129 Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown: “The Coming Age of Calm Technology” Xerox
PARC, 1996.
130 Case, Amber. Calm Technology: Principles and Patterns for Non-Intrusive Design. Ebook.
O’Reilly, 2016.
53
grabbing the center of attention and the entire topic of advertising, it is
nevertheless a practical resource for applying attentive design as far as
external interferences from technology are concerned.
So far, our research described perception as a binary concept
(whether something is lit by the flashlight or not); however, dividing
it into zones based on their resolution is helpful to design calm
communication patterns. While Weiser only mentions the center and
the periphery of attention, Case divides perception into three zones
(principles I and III): primary, secondary and tertiary, and advocates
using all of them appropriately. “We have high-resolution perception
in front of our faces [...] We can, however, hear sounds, see shapes, and
feel objects without having to directly look at them.” 131 Most of the
functions that we expect from a smartphone should not require our
undivided attention, or not for long; calm technology can minimize
these interferences (principle II). “Technology should allow us to shift
our attention to it very briefly, get the information we need, and shift
back, letting us attend to more things in our environment without
being overwhelmed.” 132
131 Ibid.
132 Ibid.
54
Each of the three zones have their appropriate style of notifications
which are not interchangeable: a tiny screen (and larger ones as well)
is informative and useful only in the center of our attention, even
when not all information it presents merits such a prominent place;
meanwhile the secondary and tertiary zones, quite inattentively, are
underused by our most common devices. “When a technology forces
a low-resolution update into the high-resolution space of your full
attention, it wastes your time, attention, and patience.” 133 Primary
attention is usually visual and direct, while the secondary zone’s
signals do not need direct and sustained focus to be perceived, mostly
consist of sound and touch; tertiary attention catches weak signs such
as distant sound, light, or environmental vibration. Each medium uses
a different channel, or a combination of them, e.g. the radio occupies
the secondary zone, and leaves all the others free, while a screen uses
the center of vision, but diminishes all the others zones, which is why
a GPS-navigator using sound is much preferred to a tiny screen during
driving. Or why a smart watchstrap with a tiny LED and vibration is
calmer and more attentive than an Apple Watch.134
Selecting which channel is relevant for a piece of information is

based entirely on context and norms (principle VIII). “A trigger has a
precondition, a notification state, and a post-condition. When setting
up a trigger for a notification, figure out what the precondition or
context for the trigger is, then determine what kind(s) of notifications
work best, and finally, test your post-condition.” 135 Whether it should be
a status indicator (which can be visual, auditory or haptic), an alert or an
alarm depends on many factors: is the environment quiet or filled with
133 Ibid.
134 The question whether some wearables or smart jewelries that filter notifications are
useful is more uncertain. Their screenless communication patterns can reduce screen
interactions on the smartphone and keep notifications in the secondary or tertiary
attentional zone. However, at the same time they bring notifications directly on the
body without being able to deal with them, possibly prompting the user to pull out their
phone more often.
135 Case, Amber. Calm Technology: Principles and Patterns for Non-Intrusive Design. Ebook.
O’Reilly, 2016.
55
a lot of other signals? Is the notification time-sensitive? Can it arrive
during a moment when a distraction is unfortunate or even dangerous?
Senses also have their peculiar advantages and disadvantages: vision is
high-resolution and it functions best in the center of attention, while
auditory perception works on the periphery as well; haptic feedback
is very personal and alerting, but it is almost imperceptible for others;
and so on. According to Case, a designer has to evaluate all these
cases and then pick a ‘just loud enough’ signal from all the options
(principle V, VII): when a little beep or tone is enough, there is no need
to make the kettle or the fridge talk to us. “In fact, most information
that comes from devices can be presented in a calm way. This is just
a matter of good design.” 136 Or, as Tea Uglow has put it more explicitly
and succinctly: “Your phone is not the Internet’s door bitch.” 137
In this last chapter, a wide range of options (collected from books,

talks, articles and personal interviews) has been presented. If they are
implemented simultaneously by designers, product managers and
policymakers, they may transform the current media environment
into one that structures more information for the benefit of individual
and public attention and less for private economic interests.
136 Ibid.
137 Tea Uglow: “An Internet Without Screens Might Look Like This”. TED Talk. May 2015.
ted.com/talks/tom_uglow_an_internet_without_screens_might_look_like_this
56
Conclusion
Marching through psychology, economy, design and other
domains to follow this research merits the reward of an extremely brief
summary. Besides, there is not one individual and all-comprehensive
answer to the original question of building sustainable and self-
controlled attention through digital design, but several fragments
and rough outlines of solutions, each of them meriting further
investigation; they cannot all be listed here.
The original problem of experiencing information glut and

scarcity of attention in our current media environment has been
amply demonstrated by extensive research. After defining attention
as the dual process of selectivity and suppression, and noting the
internal conflict between high-level top-down goals and stimulus-
driven bottom-up perceptions orienting our focus, we looked at
how information in itself is deemed valuable and how that makes
us susceptible to interferences that derail from previously set goals.
Although this is a general human trait, it has never yet been exploited
as efficiently as with our always present and connected digital devices.
Since reductive measurements of focus are driving economic decisions,
hooking attention has become an ultimate business goal, with various
negative consequences. The sheer amount of interferences decrease
self-control, productivity and increase emotional discomfort; they
ultimately reduce the number and length of optimal experiences,
resulting in a less enjoyable, satisfying or well-lived life.
57
In order to reduce private claims on attention and increase its
individual and public control, several types of steps are to be taken.
On the highest level, the options of legal solutions can set the wide
framework; still, legal solutions alone won’t be sufficient. Manifestos
or declaration of values give a direction without tools: a compass, not
a map. Zooming in to the level of individual business decisions, the
adopted behaviors and decision points start to diverge. The admirable
intention to align business metrics with personal ethics are not
executed the same way by everyone: the negotiations, compromises
(or lack thereof) and informative activities happen at different
moments of designers’ careers and in different ways. Evaluating each
job, each project or each decision, by giving talks, by educating clients
and interested people from all professions are all tried and proven
tools for raising awareness about our current attentional predicament
and creating the means for the actual design research needed to draw
the map towards attentive design.
For the design process strictly understood, two areas ought
to be revised: success metrics and design patterns. The methods
for collecting and using data about attention (and consequently
about emotions, experiences and other elusive concepts) are to
be reconsidered; at the same time, interactions and interfaces in
themselves and in context also have to change. The propositions range
from carefully calculated and iteratively evolving metrics, small tweaks
in information architecture, a coherent concept for communication
patterns, to artistic and playful visions; each of them valuable, however
modestly, on the road to attentive design.
58
59
60
Acknowledgements
First I would like to thank the designers who took the time from
their busy schedules to talk and give a glimpse into their professional
lives: Pamela Pavliscak, Ryan Rumsey and Geoffrey Dorne; and
especially to Jérémie Fontana and Darja Gartner, who also helped me
reach Ryan and Geoffrey.
I would also like to express my gratitude Daniel Sciboz for helping

me obtain the Swiss Government Excellence Scholarship, and the
Federal Commission for Scholarships for Foreign Students FCS for
financing my studies. In addition, I would like to thank Nicolas Nova
for his enthusiastic guidance at the start of the research.
Finally I would like to thank Daniel Pinkas for the patient and
thorough corrections, and for being a constant source of the references
this thesis needed. I have been extremely lucky to have a tutor who
cared so much about my work.
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62
Appendix–Interviews
Methodology
The interviews were conducted over Skype (Pavliscak, Rumsey,

Dorne) or, if possible, in person (Gartner, Fontana). The duration varied
between 38 and 71 minutes and the prepared questions were tailored
to individual profiles. The conversations followed the interviewed
designer’s trail of thought, only making sure all three levels of solution
spaces were discussed at some point, then organized the insights in
the same structure for easier understanding and comparison.
Darja Gartner&Jérémie Fontana

Two UX designers who at the time of the interview are working at
different digital agencies in Lausanne and run 17slash, a design union
together. Darja is, according to her LinkedIn profile, “a graphic designer
specializing in art direction and user experience design” doing “design
research, sketch wireframes and [...] comprehensive prototypes.”
Jérémie is “collecting experiences in different digital, advertising and
media agencies, working for brands and as a freelance designer” 138
At the time of the interview, he is an art director of an agency in
Lausanne. He is also one of the creators of The Walking Web podcast
that discusses webdesign and digital design in French. Both of them
are also organisers of Creative Mornings Geneva and other design
events. I interviewed them together on their request.
138 https://jfontana.fr/about
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Regulation, high-level solutions
“Basic human rights [...] are black and white and you cannot
negotiate some things.” [Darja] The right organization to protect
users should be an institution with real legislative(?) authority like
the EU or the UN, motivated by activists and associations, like the
Electronic Frontier Foundation. The communication can be more
challenging than in the everyday context of the agency among
colleagues or with clients as politicians can be ill-informed about the
digital world, so it’s very important to educate decisionmakers. As
the topic of attention hacking is closely linked to privacy issues, high-
level regulations should deal with them together. Bottom-up change
is happening at the same time as “the whole industry is thinking about
going in the right direction because people are not stupid and they are
using more and more ad-blockers to bypass all the trackers.” [Jérémie]
Business & communicating with clients
“We just don’t do that” [Darja] As designers, they can and do

refuse to produce certain design patterns or interactions, like sending
unnecessary notifications or track anything without active consent
(though it is sometimes difficult to define precisely what counts as
a dark pattern). At Darja’s agency, they also have a strict ethical code
of conduct in place excluding not just design patterns but certain
business models and a few industries as a whole, e.g. tobacco and arms.
Larger companies have even more power, like how Apple gives back
some control to the user over their personal data through iOS tools
to block certain application’s activity, “setting an example for smaller
companies as well” [Darja]. This is not a charity decision, as “now it
became a competitive advantage for them” [Jérémie]. When delivering
a project to a client, designers should also focus on making profitable
and ethical choices, at the same time while communicating mainly the
former ones: “the good way would be to find some other arguments
64
and metrics to convince the client or the stakeholder” [Jérémie]. And if
having all the facts and figures don’t work, some manipulation can be
useful. Illustrating the added value of user research with metaphors
can also be effective when trying to convince someone about the
importance of data privacy, attention hacking or simply about doing
design research at all before jumping into production. Starting with
interviews and creating a user journey can be likened to architectural
planning, as it’s much easier to move a wall early on in the plan than
later when it’s already built, while user testing is similar to car’s crash
test–it should work anyway, but feels unsafe to skip it.
“The pressure that they need to deliver is sometimes too
important to take good decisions” [Darja] Communicating any of
these issues in the context of an event or short conference, where future
clients can decide for themselves whether they find the information
useful or not is easier than under the pressure of negotiating of a
contract. Constraints in time and budget push them towards favoring
short-term results over “[picking] better decisions” which also pushes
the agency to accept this situation or to lose the client to another
design company. “[Digital media companies] really don’t care about
the qualitative metrics, only about the time spent on the page, the
engagement, the scroll, the clicks.”
“It’s like Silicon Valley [the series], honestly...” [Darja] Darja’s
agency applies a strict design process to any incoming request based on
The Elements of User Experience by Jesse James Garrett 139, which goes
through the layers of strategy (objectives, needs), scope (functions),
structure (interaction), skeleton (interface), and skin (visual design).
Starting with the strategy already shows whether the possible client
did reflect or not on the problem they are trying to address with their
product or service before going to a design studio. What they are
asking for is to “grasp that profit, to reach this amount of people, to
[...] produce that amount of articles or whatever. But they fail actually
to shape the values that are going to guide afterwards the product or
139 http://www.jjg.net/elements/pdf/elements.pdf
65
the service. [...] I see it also in my work, even [...] small clients [...] don’t
know why they’re doing it.” [Darja] More reflection in the early stage
of product development would save a lot of struggle later about how
to become and stay profitable and offer real value at the same time.
And if a client has already picked a quantitative metric to achieve,
they normally won’t be interested in doing or paying for qualitative
research, or research at all, “sometimes [they] don’t do any UX, [they]
just jump to Photoshop or Sketch.”[Jérémie]
Design process
“I don’t know if we can formalize it in a specific process or

framework.” [Jérémie] Clients in some industries do understand
the added value of qualitative research. “I work with some [legal or
finance] projects [where] you have to build [...] trust with the product
[...], so the qualitative metrics are more important. [...] they [have to
be] sure that all documents they are uploading, or all of the personal
information they were sharing [was] safe. [...].” [Jérémie] Using trust
as a measurement of success is difficult compared to quantitative
metrics, “you just plug JS from Google or any other analytic tool, but all
the qualitative metrics are more difficult to implement” [Jérémie] It’s
also difficult to access the data about users when the project is short or
the client has already started doing analytics, they “cannot follow the
full project from A to Z and after [...] the launch” [Jérémie] and “most
of the time [...] you never know if you’ve done a good work or not.”
[Darja] If accessing basic metrics is already an issue, it’s even harder
to try using and somehow measuring qualities, “few designers and
companies [...] think about that.” However, the classic design research
tools (user journey, persona, empathy map) can facilitate a deeper
understanding about users and their needs.
66
Ryan Rumsey
In his own words, Ryan is a “leader of innovative digital product,
design, and front-end development teams [...] delivering large-scale
solutions across a wide variety of industries, including Financial
Services, Healthcare, IT, Video Games, Customer Experience, and
Media. Concentration on developing Experience Strategy, Design
and Product Management practices in the enterprise space.” 140 His
past employers include Electronic Arts, where he led employee and
customer experience, a Nestlé R&D institution and Apple, where he
worked on enterprise tools.
Ryan also writes about how to establish a culture of design in large
companies on his Medium blog,141 and a popular talk (and blogpost) on
how to use design thinking methods to reprioritize one’s professional
goals and to figure out what kind of designer one wants to be.
“It’s all a balance, there’s no black and white to all that.” On a high
level, ethics is like religion or politics, everybody has their own truth
around it, though there’s a space for regulations similar to gambling.
Design can play a role in setting boundaries, but it may be too much for
a designer to advocate at governmental or international institutions.
“Not saying it’s impossible, but it’s a lot to take on.” However, designers
who do that and fight for radical change (e.g. Aral Balkan) make it
easier for other designers to reach more satisfying compromises and
find a balance between doing good design and good business.
“There’s maybe a reason why I don’t work at some companies.”
140 https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanrumsey/
141 https://medium.com/@ryanrumsey
67
What are these compromises exactly? “As a designer, I make the
choices of where my ethics are, where the lines are drawn, and try to
work for companies that have the same lines. When I come and work
for a company, I challenge them on where they want go to. It’s not just
designing products, it’s seeing whether they are willing to be their
word?” At the same time, businesses and users also determine what
ethics they can live with, and be responsible for that decision, although
it’s not easy to come to one and not just about business models but
about themselves as designers or human beings. “There will never be
a company I work for, a product I purchase that 100% fits everything I
align to, I change as well.”
Some concrete steps can be taken to ensure the company and the
designer working in it are on the same page: establish and agree on
a goal at the beginning, and delegate responsibility to individuals or
teams instead of a committee, otherwise there’s no accountability. If
the goal agreed upon is not met, then designers “always have choice, to
leave a job, to leave a career, to say no, there’s a lot of power in saying
that, and saying no is often the best way to measure how willing is the
company [...] to uphold the same integrity systems, the same ethics.
Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. I’m not afraid as a designer
[to say] that it crosses a line for me, that I won’t do that.”
Refusing to design certain things or to leaving a company is a
drastic step, well-communicated design research can change senior-
level decisions and avoid coming to this breakpoint. This, however,
does not mean leaving the business interest or constraints out of the
picture. “Even if you’re working at a non-profit, they are still governed
by money or time.”
Design process
“Qualitative research provides you a voice to the people who you

are [designing for], whether it’s employees or players. If you don’t do
that, then you’re not hearing them, you’re really not serving them.”
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The first task at the beginning of a design request was always to
define a successful outcome (like agreeing on the goals of the designer
and the company before starting to work there), and define a metric
for that. “Most people say ‘I want a new shiny thing that is great’ and
then we have to do analysis to understand what does great mean for
you: does it mean increased revenue, or something that moves you
emotionally?”
The overall design process did not change because the metric
was quantitative or qualitative, just how they divided time between
specific activities, like watching people use the current version of a
product. His team was constantly performing qualitative research
with a “sense of pragmatism” during a few weeks’ time for each project
in order to produce insights, even though “qualitative analysis requires
more human hours.”
Designers can advocate for real feedback through doing qualitative
research. What they had to do is to find tricky ways to get people to
listen. As a way to ease communication between the design team and
e.g. senior executives, they developed the ‘perceived value scorecard’,
a scale from 1 to 5, which was a way to roll qualitative insights into
quantitative metrics.
“The ‘perceived value scorecard’ is merely a way to get people to
listen. And the only way I can get them to listen is almost trick them
instead of talking about qualitative research. ‘Well, your adoption is
2 out of 5.’ ‘What? I wanna improve that!’ ‘Well, here’s how you can do
that.” The qualitative research could mean diary studies, observations,
interviews, which were then rolled into this scorecard that was
validated by their expertise. If they wanted to get into the detailed
research, it’s there, but more often than not their audience did not
care.
Overall the struggle was not getting the company to finance
qualitative research, but design research in general, which Ryan
overcame by softly introducing it one team at a time and see if there’s
real willingness to change, which is a different story. They’re more
69
willing to change if someone more senior is demanding change of
them, like a CEO. Then they will change. Others say that all of this
sounds very interesting, but also really hard, because it’s people, it’s
humans. It’s emotions. Which is why “it’s a lot of work to sell them
that’s important. They’ve largely been working in environments where
nobody does qualitative research.”
Geoffrey Dorne
Geoffrey is an independent designer and founder of
design&human, a design firm putting a strong emphasis on human-
based approach (instead of user-centric). His clients include the Red
Cross, the Mozilla Foundation, other non-profits, governmental
institutions, large enterprises and startups. A graduate of ENSAD
Paris, he also worked for two years as a researcher at ENSADLab. He
is currently teaching at ENSCI Les Ateliers, and is also a co-creator of
The Walking Web podcast that discusses webdesign and digital design
in French. The interview was conducted in French, the report (and the
reason for any possible misunderstandings) is my translation.
When it comes to capturing attention through dark patterns,

responsibility is divided on three levels: between companies, their
employees and their users. Companies like Facebook profit greatly from
this business model, designers, information architects, developers
might be motivated also by the professional challenge of increasing
time spent with the product. The user has the least power to change,
but it’s not impossible. Designers can also refuse to work at certain
companies, and those who recently apologized for certain features
70
could not have been naive about what they were doing. However, the
one with the most agency are the companies themselves, who could
be pursuing more interesting business models.
Considering these three levels, legislation could be a very powerful
tool, e.g. obligating companies to warn users about collecting data,
but it’s hard to write national laws for something that’s not tied to a
nation. Another way to give more space and emphasis to ethical design
would be on the model of ‘bio’ vegetables and fruits or ‘fair trade’
coffee: consumers might pay more for something that they believe to
be better for them and society in the long term.
Another tool to change is educating all three actors through e.g.

conferences, like the talk Privacy by design (together with Jérémie
Fontana), or blogging, or teaching at design schools. Defining what is
successful design (quoting Alain Findeli’s definition): is it something
that makes the world more habitable or not? (Living better could mean
different qualities: efficient, poetic or funny.) Scalability, etc. does not
matter compared to that, and if someone would want to become rich or
have a global impact, then they should have picked another profession.
This results saying no to more than half of the work requests. Putting
forth his values by creating the agency ‘design&human’ is also a way
to filter future clients. Choosing to stay a freelancer allows him to
evaluate each project, and only agreeing if the client’s business model
is or could be aligned with his personal value system. NGO’s or social
enterprises are easier to work with in this aspect, but they are not
the only ones, and sometimes the only barrier is ignorance in certain
things for the clients, and when asked (e.g. to print on recycled paper),
they are happy to change.
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Design process
When it’s possible to use values instead of metrics as a success

requirement, what really changes is the research phase. His
qualitative research tools are taken from ethnographic observation
and anthropological methods learned during the time he spent at
ENSAD Lab as a researcher. When he arrived to a problem statement
or insight, then the production of wireframes, visual design and user
testing is closer to the classical workflow of design projects. Geoffrey is
also suspicious about big (quantitative) data, because if everyone has
the same data set, then everyone would arrive to the same solution,
whereas a qualitative approach could result in something unexpected
and original.
Pamela Pavliscak
Pamela is a founder of Change Sciences, “an insights and innovation
firm. [Their] work is a cross between future foresight and design
thinking, ethnographic research and data science. [They’ve] helped
a wide range of clients envision and enact a more human, inclusive,
and prosperous future for their customers and constituents.” She is
also the author of the Positive Design Manifesto that states principles to
keep in mind during design that is made to last: autonomy/mastery,
trust, creativity, connection and meaning. When asked about how
she defined these principles, she said “it’s a combination of looking
at personal and other’s research on well-being has uncovered.” “They
all kind of live on [the] spectrum of happiness, and well-being is part
pleasure and enjoyment, part purpose and meaning. [...] I started
there. And then I started to do some of my own research and look at
what is it that people are feeling good about and where are their low
points in technology.”
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Pamela also teaches at the Pratt Institute and gives talks on
different topics concerning emotion and technology. She is the author
of Data Informed Product Design, and the soon to be published
Designing for Happiness, both from O’Reilly Media.
“I wonder if it will have other unforeseen consequences that we

perhaps need to think about.” We might be seeing more regulations
in the digital world as “a lot of these bigger companies are getting
so much critique, so much attention right now on these issues, that
[...] change [could be] imminent.” However, high-level solutions, e.g.
regulations or committing to something in abstract feels riskier than
trying to achieve the values of the manifesto in a specific project.
“Maybe designers should have something like a Hippocratic Oath,
[...] professional organizations have codes of ethics and I think those
probably need to be revisited in the age of AI and expanded, because
that’s going to touch all of our work. [...] The downside is that we can’t
just rely on an oath, because I worry that a lower-level designer will take
a fall for what is actually a decision [coming from] higher-up, and then
there are implications for that, for instance [...] there might be lawsuits
against not just companies but individuals as there are against doctors
and lawyers, would we have to carry malpractice insurance?”
“For people to [...] say ‘I don’t have bad intentions’ would probably
be pretty rare!” Regulations in themselves won’t solve it all, but
neither are they useless. “On the one hand, you hope that there’d be
a top-down initiative to take a better course towards well-being,
at the same time, we have a lot of agency as designers, developers,
researchers, consultants, and what we choose to do, how we choose
73
to do it, what we choose to work on.” And can she herself exercise
this agency? “I would feel comfortable with [saying no to a request],
certainly.”
“I wonder where or if these conversations are happening”
“that’s [...] been the goal of technology [...] to make lives easier,
make things fair for people, we all have that impulse if we’ve gotten
into technology probably even at the highest level. [...] So mostly
everyone I’ve worked with feels like they’re striving for a higher goal”
and “all our clients are pretty concerned with the customer or the
user.” The reason is that “[her] clients are a self-selecting group in a lot
of ways, because they have already made [the choice] to do things a
little differently and [she doesn’t] have to do a lot of convincing.” “The
most forward-thinking companies are trying to think 5 years out, 10
years out, what is long-term customer relationship going to look like
rather than just grab attention right now. I think that’s changing, [but]
I don’t think we’re there yet.” This means some companies are willing
to do research over a longer time period and experiment with new
ways of understanding their customers. “I can’t talk about specific
projects, but I can say that it’s actually all over the spectrum, it’s in very
traditional industries like financial services, to e-commerce. Where
we’re not seeing it is start-ups and pure tech companies, which I think
is interesting. I’m seeing it more in traditional industries or existing
organizations that are trying to transform themselves and move into
a more digital-virtual state.” And why aren’t technological companies
capable to think ahead in their native environment? “There’s just so
much pressure on pure tech companies or on startups to get going and
show some returns, [...] it’s really hard to make that pace, whereas in
industries that have already been around a while are used to thinking
longer term and so it’s not as rare for them [to plan] what kind of
relationship are we having with our customers for the next 10 years,
because they have already been around that long. Maybe what’s
going on it’s just that I personally haven’t worked for any of the tech
companies who are thinking [about long-term strategy].”
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“It’s just a matter of figuring out better ways to do it”
Designers have many ways to practice truly customer-centric
design, like “encouraging companies to look at different models,
include other metrics besides just bottom-line ones [and then] looking
for new ways to design, and doing it, because a lot of times we don’t
have top-down micromanagement on how do we design something,
or how we put something together, so designers and developers have
a fair amount of agency and make those decisions. It’s just a matter
of figuring out better ways to do it and I’m sharing those strategies.”
These new ways can be unusual, “clients have been surprised by what
we’re trying to gather and measure and it interests them what those
results look like, because it’s different from than what they’re seeing
[as] typical UX and design research.”
Design process
Figuring out new ways of research to see how the the criterias
of the Positive Design Manifesto can be fulfilled in a client project is
challenging. “Anything emotional is pretty difficult, [...] you can’t put
a number on an emotion, or on the nature of the relationship or long-
term values, [it’s] just kind of a stand-in or shorthand for something
that you can get started with, looking at, paying attention to... I’m not
sure if quantifying is ideal [...] for a lot of these things but it does get
organizations to pay attention, and it gives a way to look at that goal.
In that sense, it can be.”
The current state of this search can be tried at Soundingbox,
where “Qual and quant are equal citizens.” Here, trust, creativity and
connection appear as something that can be expressed with a number.
“[We] experiment out loud to try to measure some of these things and
see if we can come up with something that’s meaningful, and I think
we’re on the right track.” What happens in practice is looking for “what
other ways could we ask the question, what could we track over time,
are there certain behaviors or feelings, [...] so that’s what we’re looking
75
and experimenting with in the course of doing studies, or ourselves,
in-house and the clients too.” “It’s kind of funny, because we’re really all
at this phase, we have some idea of what’s wrong, but how do we fix it,
but like I said, I think I’m only starting to get there, and this would be
a very rich area of research and thinking as we move forward, but I do
have a little bit of a start at it.” As for concrete methods or tools used,
she emphasized asking and tweaking questions to gather meaningful
answers over simple observation. “I have an almost ideological problem
with [observation] in a lot of ways because if we’re only observing and
trying to articulate the story of the people ourselves, we’re missing
out on their story and how they’re making meaning and coherence.
It is an experiment, we look at what academic research is relevant,
we’re looking at different ways to measure emotional states, a ton of
different scales and models that we can use, [if] there’s anything we
learned in all of this, especially in studying emotion, is that it’s super
complicated and I guess I wouldn’t want it any other way.”
The next step would be to figure out how to use these insights.
The manifesto is a good reference point, but it is high-level, coming
from studying happiness in other disciplines (psychology, behavioral
economics, etc.), “these are not anything particularly new, right?” On a
higher level, as she has mentioned, designers and businesses need to
change the goal or definition of success, and look at e.g. “countries [...]
tracking healthcare or education or other aspects of well-being.” But
during our everyday work “in design, we need really thorough, small,
concrete steps to follow, and we rely on best practices and conventions
used on other sites,” and designers need to look “at patterns that
we know to detract from people’s experience. [...] We’re starting to
understand dark patterns related to attention [...] We can avoid that,
but what are the positive patterns or principles that we can use to
design with? That’s what I’ve been thinking a lot about. I don’t claim
to have all the answers to that.” “I’m just starting to catalog those [...]
76
There’s a fair amount of these, we just haven’t really thought about it
this way. I certainly don’t have it all figured out. It’s something we all
need to do.”
How did she do it? After taking existing research from different
fields, most notably positive psychology, including Martin Seligman’s
work, she started doing her own research on what are people’s high
and low points with technology, when does it make them feel good.
The answers came through diary studies, followed by ethnographic
interviews. “It was all over the place in a lot of ways, but once I got
enough diary entries and enough people thinking about it and
trying to document this at several points during their day, when
was technology contributing to their well-being and when was it
detracting, some patterns emerged and that’s where those principles
come into way. They mostly align with a lot of other frameworks,
except I think creativity is unique and interesting, [...] not the kind of
creativity that we maybe think of as designers, where we’re thinking
of making something really fabulous from start to finish, but instead
people thought about small doses, like crafting the perfect playlist
to share with their friends or making a really great post or coming
up with a beautiful photo on Instagram. [...] There’ll always be room
to improve, but it’s unique partly because it gives people satisfaction
and joy, and partly because they’re making their own meaning, it’s
not finished and easy and frictionless, there’s something for them to
do that is meaningful. I think that’s really important to keep in mind,
because [...] on one hand we’re driving for people’s attention, on the
other hand, we’re very concerned with making it easy, frictionless,
convenient, [...] that runs counter to a lot of the things that make people
happy sometimes with technology. It’s not always the case, but in a lot
of cases people want some kind of meaningful way to engage.”
Does the manifesto or thinking about attention change what kind
of interfaces she works with? “Absolutely. [...] There’s a place for doing a
better job for attention on all levels, screens take a lot of our attention,
so [in] that perspective, it might actually be good to get off, to move
77
ourselves off the screens and focus on other areas like conversational
UI and some bots, wearables.” “I don’t know if we can assume that it
will be automatically better if we get the screens out of the picture. I
think it probably does have a positive impact in a lot of ways.” “[... But]
we can’t automatically assume those things are gonna be better for our
well-being or our attention, because of the nature of human beings,
we’re weird and wonderful, and sometimes we’ve awful relationships
with technology.”
78
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82
The observation that motivated me to write this thesis is that the
overabundance of information available from our devices at any given
moment turned attention into a scarcity. What are the consequences, and
how could we instead build self-control and sustainability of attention
with digital design?
The first part of this research looks at different psychological aspects
of attention and our relationship with information as a reward and a
powerful need. The second and third part is about how the human mind
exists in the attention economy, what are the most popular methods of
our current media environment for grabbing our attention, and how do
they affect our ability to ‘single-task’. If we cannot focus deeply, can we
still experience true happiness?
In the last part, I will try to outline what could be attentive design,
partially based on interviews with digital designers who are already
aware of similar issues, in order to learn from their approach on the road
to attentive design.

Attentive Design

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Attentive Design

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Attentive Design

How to build sustainable,

Racsko, Julia–Attentive design

Set in Alegreya, Alegreya Sans and Alegreya Sans SC.

The place of technology in our lives is (still) changing. It feels like

In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a

The wealth, or even glut, of information is hardly debatable, but

All in all, we look at the screen of the smartphone around 80 times a

10 Pew Research Center “The Smartphone Difference” April, 2015. pewinternet.

One of the main difficulties in talking about and measuring

15 Ibid. p32.

16 Ibid. p34.

Information as a reward and information

Most of the interferences we are subjected to are pieces of

22 E. S. Bromberg-Martin and O. Hikosaka: “Midbrain Dopamine Neurons Signal

26 With an English translation by Harry Caplan. Ad C. Herennium. De Ratione Dicendi

Two key factors of the attention economy that I wish to emphasize

As we have seen in the previous part of this research, the mind

39 Wilshere, Andrew: Are Notifications A Dark Pattern? 2017, trydesignlab.com/blog/

Since external notifications turned out to be relatively manageable

Undergoing the cycle of trigger, action, variable reward and

Ethical design in the attention economy

45 Ibid. chapter 6. What Are You Going to Do with This?

Technology that Technology that respects Technology that respects

47 Zuboff, S: “Big other: surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information

54 Miller, George A. Informavores. The study of information: Interdisciplinary messages. 1984.

Optimal experience as happiness

Defining happiness without getting tangled up in a cultural,

First, the experience usually occurs when we confront tasks we

90 Crawford, Matthew B. World Beyond Your Head : On Becoming an Individual in an Age of

The struggle to organise and deliver information through design

[Giant IT platform companies] claim they are merely distributing

One reason that makes designers and engineers optimistic about

Imposing rules in the form of manifestos or principles on one’s own

After going through several manifestos and the individual

111 Change Sciences. changesciences.com (accessed Jan 30, 2018)

Everyday business struggles

Pamela Pavliscak’s account of ‘business as usual’ at Change

Designer’s tools and solutions

Agreeing with Tea Uglow, a designer at Google’s Creative Park in

Starting small, let’s see how a designer can experiment in modest

For both Pamela Pavliscak and Ryan Rumsey, picking what to

The ‘perceived value scorecard’ is merely a way to get people to

The qualitative research resulting in this score could come from

What happens after comprehensive data about attention, trust

Before giving up hope on bridging the present and the desired

I. Technology should require the smallest possible amount of

The relevance of most of these rules for attentive design is quite

Selecting which channel is relevant for a piece of information is

In this last chapter, a wide range of options (collected from books,

The original problem of experiencing information glut and

I would also like to express my gratitude Daniel Sciboz for helping

The interviews were conducted over Skype (Pavliscak, Rumsey,

Darja Gartner&Jérémie Fontana

Business & communicating with clients

“We just don’t do that” [Darja] As designers, they can and do

“I don’t know if we can formalize it in a specific process or

Regulation, high-level solutions

Business & communicating with clients

“There’s maybe a reason why I don’t work at some companies.”

“Qualitative research provides you a voice to the people who you

Regulation, high-level solutions

When it comes to capturing attention through dark patterns,

Business & communicating with clients