Diplomas

Midterms Recap

How can I implement more nuance & complexity?

I want to shift the focus a bit back to the anticipatory nature of anxiety and how we can reframe our (sometimes mislead) predictions about future threats.

(Quick) Reseach

• Christian Nold’s Emotional Geography & time-geography
• Episodic Memory and Mental Time Travel:
  • Mental time travel as a reflection exercise to create relief from anxiety: Create confidence in the prediciton that there will be an “after” to the situation
  • Help you overcome fear about things you actually want to be doing

Updated Version: Flow

1. Notice when and where you are anxious
2. Log in how long you estimate the “event” that is causing distress will take (i.e. when it will have passed)
3. A column is created along the vertical time-axis that represents that duration. It is shrinking as time moves on.
4. When the column is completely gone (i.e. the “threat” has passed), you can log in whether you perceived it as:
   • “Better than expected”
   • “About what you expected”
   • “Harder than expected”
5. Additionally, you can leave a little note to yourself to remind you of that moment and how you felt (optional)
6. A mark is left where the column has stood with the respective colours of how you reflected that the experience actually went. It serves as a reminder to “retrain” your brain about how and when you were able to subvert your anxiety and actually create good experiences out of it.
7. The topography that is created is split into your “personal map”, showing only what you logged in, and an opt-in “shared map”, showing what others logged in as well.

https://emilia-jpg.github.io/after-the-storm

Feedback from testing

• Include a compass to lead to nearby marks + a camera reset button
• Possibility to reflect from anywhere on a past situation, if you forget to do it at the point you logged an anxiety in
• Reminder when an event is over
• Setting a time didn’t really impact the event itself, but coming back later to check it off felt like a conclusion
• Helps to recognize success: “… I expected to do much worse than I did. I can imagine that building a map with these sorts of scenarios would help manage anxieties/ seeing past successes visualised would lessen the blows of failure.”

What to add/change/general Questions

• A possibility to log in “positive” expectations as well?
  • Would that take away from the idea of “reframing”/”subverting” negative expectations?
  • Would the reflections be disproportional to the ones about negative expectations? (If an event that I expect to be positive went as I expect, it would leave the same mark as an event that I expect to be negative that went as I expected)
• Create little “tokens” that grow or multiply as reflection marks are created
  • Only for positively subverted expectations or for all reflections?
  • What exactly would “grow” there? (abstract geometry, trees, creatures, lanterns, …)

Next Steps

• More testing: ideas for things to do that are scary?
• IT support for the “shared map”
• Get a version ready to share with more people by design freeze