Digital media has fundamentally changed our communication behavior. The number of messages we receive every day makes it almost impossible to distinguish which of the information they contain is relevant to us at any given moment. We are forced to treat every message with equal attention. This takes up a lot of time and attention and often distracts us from other, actually important things in our everyday lives.
Mindful Messaging is a communication concept with the goal of reducing the daily flood of information in the form of messages and e-mails. With the help of situational message tags on the sender's side and filter options for the recipient, a more conscious and considerate communication between people in the digital space should be made possible.
Prioritization
Based on the Eisenhower Matrix method, which was originally used to prioritize tasks, all messages can be rated according to the importance and urgency of their content and assigned to one of the four quadrants.
Sender
This prioritization by importance and urgency must be done manually by the sender before sending each message. By reflecting on the current relevance of the message content for the recipient, a more conscious sending behavior should develop.
Recipient
On the recipient's side, the messages are sorted in a hierarchical order based on their prioritization. Urgent & important messages come first, followed by urgent & non-urgent and non-urgent & important. At the bottom are the non-urgent & non-important messages. This list view allows the recipient to see at a glance which messages are relevant to them at the moment.
Life & Work
In addition to the prioritization, messages are divided according to their context - leisure and work. These two inboxes appear as modes between which the user can switch. If the recipient is in work mode, they will only receive messages from senders who are also in work mode. Private messages, on the other hand, are not delivered. Only when the recipient switches to leisure mode will their leisure inbox be displayed.
Reflection
This concept was developed in the course Invention Design at the HfG Schwäbisch Gmünd. The goal was to explore and develop an application for an emerging technology. Throughout our research we came across the issue of information overload accross different touchpoints such as social media, news and messaging caused by digital communication technologies.
While trying to find a solution to this issue we were faced with the question if a new technology like AI was the right way to solve an issue which was initially caused by a different technology. We as a group delibertaly decided against the use of an emerging technology as we wanted to solve the problem of information overload in messaging at it’s root.
Therefore we propose a concept that does not outsource the task of prioritizing messages to a technology like AI but gives that responsibility back to the human actors. We do this by adding an additional step to the process of sending a digital message, thereby creating a small hurdle. This creates a moment of reflection for the sender to asses the relevance of the message both for the reciver but also for oneself with regards to the need of a response. We aim to bring back some empathy inspired by the dynamcis of face-to-face interpersonal communication.