One Pager¶
Attention in Motion
Constraint-based practices for observing and shaping attention
In the attention economy, human attention is treated as a resource to be extracted. Platforms, products, and media are designed to capture attention by any means necessary, shaping what people notice, and how they relate to the world. The effects of this are widespread. Many people report feeling distracted and overwhelmed, while at a larger scale attention is steered in ways that influence politics, culture, and power. Weak signals from the previous AOWS deck such as technofascism and extractivism point to futures where attention is controlled through infrastructures built to extract value. I’m adding another weak signal, attention wars, to describe the growing struggle over who gets to shape what we attend to. This project matters now because if we do not learn how to direct our own attention, it will be directed by those who seek to use it for power and profit.
Before attention can be directed, it first needs to be understood. Rather than asking how to control attention, this project asks how attention actually works. It takes the position that attention is never fully self-directed, but always shaped through a negotiation between the body and the environment. In this context, training attention does not mean increasing focus or productivity. It means learning to notice how attention shifts, what pulls it, and how it feels as it moves. To explore this, the project uses urban dérives as a low-tech, constraint based method for studying attention.
The project began with first-person observation, tracking attention in daily interactions with my phone, and then developed through the design of simple actions that interrupt habitual attentional patterns. These actions evolved into urban dérives, allowing attention to be explored without relying on screens or metrics. Operative mapping was used to reflect on these experiences, turning moments of attention into traces that can be revisited and compared. More recently, I attempted to formalize a random generative methodology that allows anyone to create their own dérives and examine how attention moves for them.
By using dérives to change the conditions under which attention unfolds, the project shows how attention can begin to be shaped and examined without relying on screens or metrics. This approach offers designers, researchers, urban planners, and others a way to study attention in everyday environments, rather than through screen-based experiments or behavioral data extracted from digital platforms. It is especially relevant for those interested in how the built environment, and ways of moving through it, shape attention.
This project is limited by its reliance on first-person experience and subjective observation. One possible direction would be to pair these practices with bodily data, capturing signals such as movement, gaze, or other physiological responses. Another direction would be to translate the methodology into a more playful and commercial format, such as dérive decks for different cities, allowing tourists to experience cities in ways they would never otherwise. Open questions remain around what makes a meaningful constraint when creating a dérive, how the experience of attention changes in a group setting, if a playful experience can be a useful tool, and whether usefulness is always the goal. A further limitation is that so far the project only interacts with physical space, while much of the attention economy operates through digital environments, pointing to future work that could extend these methods into the digital world.