I’ve realized that my wide-ranging, preliminary ideas including a flow driven game, a home inventory system, and a social networking site, were fundamentally ways to improve people’s quality of life. In the sense that these ideas would theoretically help people out, one could see them as remedies. If these would be remedies, what would be the singular disease? Life itself? Is life that terrible that I/we need remedies? Sometimes. But who am I to isolate specific challenges and “prescribe medicine” for others? I could identify areas in my own life to address, but I don’t want this project to be about me and my problems. So what? Well, as a human being, I know that a balanced, healthy existence is seriously complicated, but one simple truth is that it must include some good stuff.
By going through more internal and external discussions, my difficulty of having too many broad ideas has become partially solved by focusing on a more specific, ultimate goal: creating happiness (perhaps defined as “feeling good”) through flow (the psychology of optimal experience). In other words, I want to enhance one’s immediate feelings through satisfying personal-awareness and adrenalin-inducing social interactions using various methods (i.e. technologies, behaviors, events, competitions, products). Thanks, thesis support network!
My next steps:
– contact the Feel Good Day folks (Thanks, Taylor!)
– identify several additional experiments around Mihaly Csikszentmihaly’s Theory (flow), and study them.
– flesh out a detailed list of methods for cultivating “flowareness” and spreading its effects