5 Questions that you will investigate with your thesis project.

1. How can we enable people to spend less time on their computers at their desks, without reducing the amount of useful or meaningful work they produce?
2. How can we make the time that people spend on their mobile devices more useful or meaningful?
3. Is this a problem a lot of other people have?
4. What are some existing examples of people trying to solve this and why have they worked or not worked?
5. What is a feasible device, using technologies readily available today, that we can make to help solve this?

3 Possible venues for your work to be shown. Why?

This will be a product rather than a piece, and will likely be showcased mostly on the internet rather than at conferences.

• In a HCI conference, so I can get feedback and for the good ideas in this project to hopefully be used by other people.
• As a usable product that people can purchase: I want people to be able to use it!
• On Product Hunt / Hacker News: So I can see product feedback from people who have experience making products or code.
• On Twitter: So I can get feedback from people who are not necessarily technical.
• On GitHub, as an open-source project: So I can find collaborators and contributors and to make the project more self-sustaining.

3 Experts or types of people you would like to speak to about your thesis.

• People who study hardware computer user interfaces.
• People who study attention and distraction.
• People who work on accessibility technology.

I believe that sometimes normal people their issues better than the experts, so I’d also like to talk to:

• Office workers and students who would like to spend less time at their compute and more time outdoors.
• People who get extremely distracted, whether or not by screens.

Exercise: Possible personas

• Business Ben is always on the go, going from meeting to meeting, and needs to be able to jot down his thoughts without being at a desk. Or perhaps Ben is a minimum-wage worker with a dream of writing his own novel, and his only chance to do so is during his breaks at work and on his crowded public transit commute.
• Distracted Dan wants to be able to communicate with friends without being able to distracted by the latest news or email. Dan likes talking to friends in person, and it’s not that messaging other people bothers him, as much as that simply opening up his computer or phone leads to notifications that he must clear first, etc.
• In-nature Noelle is an outdoorsy person and wants to be able to wants to be able to go camping, biking, and hiking without having to always carry a computer or phone around on trips. Or at least, if she’s carrying them, can they just stay in her bag when she’s using it to navigate or chat?