I’m a 3rd year PhD student here in the responsive environments group of the lab.  When I reflect on the meaningful experiences I’ve had in my life — from deeply engaged conversation, to flowing immersion with my work, to concerts and theatre that have touched me deeply — I see a lot of similarities in the structure behind those experiences.  I chase those experiences.  I covet them.  I also think those experiences are under threat in a world where eyeballs are a direct proxy for money.  To compete and succeed, tech companies are all but forced to addict us to their products, harnessing our cognitive biases against us.  This is the world of the attention economy.

I want to fix this.  I know that my technology is working against me quite successfully —  I obsessively check my email; I rarely leave a moment unfilled. I carry the subtle weight of an always-connected society with me in all of my daily experiences.  Fortunately, we have the ability to reclaim the subconscious behavioral tricks being used to pull us toward automatic micro-behaviors we *don’t* choose and *don’t* control, and repurpose them to prime us for deeply engaged experiences with people and tasks that we *do*.  Technology has matured to a point where deep quantified self and deep ubiquitous computing can make this world a reality.

I believe in this future.  And while I’m confident I can make substantial progress on the tech, I’m equally interested in tackling the questions of the marketplace.  The technology doesn’t matter if it doesn’t change lives.  How do we find the most effective places to make a difference?  What are the limits of selling carrots in a chocolate-bar world?  How can we take back the power over our tools and our tech, instead of continuing the tenuous, pathological march in reverse?