People who design apps — or, for that matter, design startup companies — want their creations to elicit excitement. They (usually) design to avoid creating boredom. A fairly recent Canadian study offers exciting insights into the nature of boredom. Designers take heed! The study is “The Unengaged Mind: Defining Boredom in Terms of Attention,” John D. Eastwood, Alexandra Frischen, Mark J. Fenske and Daniel […]
Tag: boredom
A possibly fascinating study of four possible causes of boredom propensity
Some academic studies are best appreciated by reading them aloud, in a stately voice, in a coffee shop. Perhaps this is one of those studies: “I can’t get no satisfaction: Potential causes of boredom,” Cory J. Gerritsen, Maggie E. Toplak [pictured here], Jessica Sciaraffa, John Eastwood, Consciousness and Cognition, vol. 27, July 2014, pp. 27–41. […]
Boos Act as Booze on the Power-Hungry
An experiment measured what happened when power-driven people gave speeches to an audience that responded with blatant, deliberate acts of boredom. The researchers, Eugene Fodor and David Wick of Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York, wrote up the details in a blandly titled monograph, Need for Power and Affective Response to Negative Audience Reaction to […]
Towards a Boredom Recognition Engine
Although boredom very rarely escapes the notice of those suffering from it, constructing a purely technical instrument for reliably recognising boredom in humans is currently rated as a non-trivial task. But recently, a team from George Mason University, the University of North Carolina, the Georgia Institute of Technology and the Naval Research Lab, Washington, DC […]