mircea

“Social media companies aim to colonize every minute of our lives”. (Bo Burnham)

Aiki

Aiki is a martial arts principle that allows a practitioner to redirect an opponent’s power back against themselves.

Aiki is also a browser extension that considers social media (and other time-wasting websites) as the oponent that needs to be fought back against.

This project helps an internet user take advantage of their habits of visiting time-wasting web sites and consider the (often involuntary) impulses of visiting the said websites as a reminder for doing something useful, e.g. learning Danish or getting better at programming in Python. What is useful for each user, it is up to them to decide.

Aiki @ CHI 2023

Nanna, Bjørn, John and I have a new paper on Aiki at CHI’23: Challenges and Opportunities of Using Redirection of Activity for Self-Regulation Online

It investigates how Aiki 2.0 – an improved version of Aiki in terms of usability – fares to help people drop procrastination and instead learn programming with the help of micro-learning activities.

Another awesome video directed by Nanna that presents the highlights of the paper:

Aiki @ CHI 2021

Nanna Inie directed an amazing video showcasing Aiki for our CHI’21 presentation.

The corresponding paper with Nanna Inie, Aiki: Turning Procrastination into Microlearning shows that:

People who want to learn Danish can use redirection from time-wasting-websites as a strategy and cue to remember that they should learn
Participants learned quite a bit of Danish and some of them actually found the learning a better use of their time than the ‘mindless’ scrolling on Facebook

Team

Nanna Inie
Bjørn Hjorth Westh
John Muller
Gabriel Frejberg Agger-Nielsen
Mircea Lungu

Papers

CHI’23: Nanna Inie, Bjørn Hjorth Westh, John Muller, Mircea F. Lungu: Challenges and Opportunities of Using Redirection of Activity for Self-Regulation Online. In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ‘23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA.

CHI’21: Nanna Inie and Mircea F. Lungu. 2021. Aiki: Turning Procrastination into Microlearning. In Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ‘21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 369, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445202

Download

Aiki-CHI’23 Version - zipped archive; You must install manually in your Browser

Source Code

Aiki-CHI’21 Version Code: github.com/aiki-extension
License: MIT

Future Work

Short Term
- generalize the extension
  - remove the hardcoded redirections to either language websites or programmig; let people redirect to whatever they like
- publish the extesion
  - publish also for Firefox besides Chrome
  - make the backend ready for publication
Design a large scale in-the-wild expertiment
Longer Term
- implement interceptions also on mobile devices

Relevant News

A think tank has recommended a time limit on children’s social media access. The recommendation is based on research showing that excessive social media use can lead to unhappiness. The think tank also pointed out that children can be exposed to violent content on social media and made 11 recommendations to tackle the problem. In Denmark the Minister of Culture has supported the proposals, and will discuss them with his Nordic counterparts on May 3rd. He also argues that effective age verification should be introduced at the EU level.

“Personally, I have tried to increase the time I spend reading books or longer-form journalism, for example, and cutting back on Twitter (I fail often, but at least I’m failing consciously)”. (Richard Fisher, Time-warped: how modern life shortens our perspectives, from theguardian.com)