Abstract
Digital technologies have become pervasive through our lives making many question whether they are beneficial or detrimental to users and their mental wellbeing. This portfolio addresses two technologies in particular, smartphones and virtual reality systems. The sociotechnical paper explores harmful digital applications and what design patterns are causing cellphone addiction. It uses the Political Economy of Attention to frame the issue and help understand the motive behind using these designs. The technical report focuses on how alternate reality (AR) technologies could be used to innovate learning and create lasting knowledge. The associated deliverable is an immersive AR application that overlays past and alternate versions of UVA historic locations and guides users on a tour to educate them on the school’s extensive history. Together, these papers will investigate the effects technologies can have on a user’s mental wellbeing.
The smartphone is a key infrastructure in many people’s lives, functioning as a communication device, health monitor, and a simple camera. However, there is vast amounts of evidence showing smartphone usage is correlated to behaviors that are indicative of addiction. When concerns like this come from a vital component of people’s lives, it becomes important to ask if the smartphone itself is the root of these problems or if engineers are designing downloadable applications to make the smartphone problematic. To understand this, the sociotechnical paper performs several case studies on common design features of smartphone applications and analyzes how they can be leading to cellphone addiction. It concludes that features like short-form content, infinite scroll mechanisms, and recommendation algorithms are deliberate design choices engineered to manipulate users and capture attention to produce revenue. These designs lead to widespread mental health issues which range from anxiety and depression, to issues with concentration and sleep.
While the smartphone is an unfortunate case of exploiting technology, could there be a way to use new digital technologies such as augmented and virtual reality for good? This technical paper presents Hoo Knows History, an Augmented Reality application aimed to give Charlottesville residents a more dynamic look into the past at The University of Virginia. Current traditional methods of exploring UVA’s history are guided tours, hidden plaques, and written media, this application aims to improve that experience through an immersive, location based tour and allowing users to explore historical sites by digitally overlaying historic views over the present day camera view. To evaluate the educational impact and user experience of the application 6 users were given a pre-tour questionnaire a week ahead of the tour, then completed the tour using AR, and finally took a post-test after the tour. Our results showed a 42.86% increase in accuracy between the pre-test and post-test, suggesting that AR can be used as a tool for increased user engagement and informal educational settings. This work overall demonstrates the potential for Augmented Reality applications to be used as a tool for immersive and engaging historical education.
This research is not perfect and several improvements should have been made. The technical capstone was missing features our team had planned to complete such as an interactive map that showed all completed historic locations and even “hidden” history spots that the user would have to find. In addition, user feedback indicated improvements to the UI should be made as the average “intuitiviness” score was 5.75/10 instead of the goal of 8/10. For the sociotechnical paper, I think it was very broad which gives the reader a great glimpse into just how vital the smartphone is and the side effects of its exploitation. However, personally I think more discussion on how smartphones operate as a piece of infrastructure could push more sociotechnical investigations on it as a whole and could contribute to a larger conversation on current communication and work cultures.
In an ending note I would like to thank all the people who contributed to this research portfolio. I am grateful for my peers on my capstone team for the technical project, Rythama Chevandra, Aadarsh Natarjan, and Kathleen O'Donovan, they were dedicated to our project and saw it through to the end. Next, my capstone professor Mark Sherriff guided and gave feedback to our technical project throughout the semester and reassured us when we weren’t able to accomplish all of our goals. Finally, my two advisors for my sociotechnical paper, Caitlin Wylie and Angela Orebaugh, helped me develop my ideas and craft a product I am proud of.
