1- Innovative design—Describe your new design, app, service, product, etc.

For my design, I wanted to follow a theme we discussed a lot in the first few weeks of class, and that category for this task was Attention. In the task, it describes attention as “How and where we focus our attention” and “Enabled to bring more focus and mindfulness”. I think when it comes to technology, it is important to understand that most manufacturers create apps and social media platforms that are programmed to grasp your attention for as long as they possibly can. They use this to keep you hooked, sell products for sponsors and keep you coming back for more content multiple times per day for hours on end. My goal is to create an app or software that gives you notifications when you spend a significant amount of time on an app and can even give you reminders of things you need to do for the day. The goal of this app is to make us more mindful about how much social media/tech use we are using and maybe motivate us a bit more to put our phones down and take on more of our hobbies throughout the day, or meet up with a friend for food or coffee, anything that influences us to use less technology and go out and do more. I can think of many days where I stayed in bed super late browsing social media or wasted a whole class time on snapchat or Instagram. This app could make you be able stay on track with your goals and monitor social media use which could be good for mental, physical and emotional health.

2- Upgraded criteria—state your criteria and why you picked it. Why is it important to you & your community?

This could be important to our community because it enables us to be more mindful about our technology use which could result in more involvement with our friends and family and community. The reason why I picked this topic is because even before I took this class and became aware of how addicted our society is to social media, I noticed it on my own. When my phone would die, I would panic because I could not contact my friends or see what they were up to. I would also compare myself to others on social media because I was on it so much to a point where it was an integral part of my self esteem. These reasons are why I would have benefitted earlier on from an app or program that could increase mindfulness on how much we really are using these apps compared to doing things in our day to day lives that actually improve lifestyle and happiness.

3- Supportive context—describe the context or world/community that will support this.

I think this app could benefit the younger generation more than the older generation because obviously in our society today, it’s mostly the young generation such as college, high school and middle school kids that are being affected. Obviously as we get older, our bad habits will carry on to adulthood if we don’t do something about it which could result in less people being employed in businesses all around the world because of laziness and addiction to the online world drawing us away from tasks at hand. I think that if we taught in schools the harmfulness of social media overuse combined with this app or program that I am proposing, we could see a change in how much social media we use and be more connected to each other in real life.

4- Weight Costs—Evaluate expected costs—materials. Labor, etc.–this is not a number or monetary figure, but rather a description of the expected costs to the environment, people, etc.

One thing I thought about while brainstorming ideas for this task is that big companies like instagram, snapchat, twitter and facebook could make a lot less money if people collectively came to an agreement that it is unhealthy and we need to drastically cut down on use. I think the amount of money that would have to be spent creating this program or app all depends on how much it would be marketed and who it would be marketed to. It would be difficult to get the message off to young kids to use this app unless they realized the problem at hand. Being in NMD 200, it is easy for me to say that I could benefit from this app and a lot of people around me also could. The problem is kids are naive and would not feel the need to have one of these on their phones. Thats why public figures, teachers and alumni all over could preach the idea, making it expensive. I think it’s less about the software and app/program and more about the person using it.

Potentially Downfalls?

This could be invasive by collecting and selling your information because the software could only work if it could monitor your use of social media.