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.

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

Current Team

• Nanna Inie
• Bjørn Hjorth Westh
• John Muller
• Mircea Lungu

Papers

CHI’23: Challenges and Opportunities of Using Redirection of Activity for Self-Regulation Online

• A paper that 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

CHI’21: Aiki: Turning Procrastination into Microlearning

• A study with Nanna Inie
• 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
• Our 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

Source Code

• 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

Past Contributors

• Gabriel Frejberg Agger-Nielsen