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

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