My Myers Briggs Test and The Microtrend Diary

ENFP

A few weeks back I was asked to fill in my own Myers Briggs questionnaire to enable me to find out about what personality type I am likely to be. The Myers Briggs Type Indicator is “a psychometric questionnaire designed to measure psychological preferences in how people perceive the world and make decisions”. These preferences were extrapolated from the typological theories originated by Carl Gustav Jung, as published in his 1921 book Psychological Types. He stated that there are four main functions of consciousness, two of them being perceiving functions: Sensation and Intuition and two being judging functions Thinking and Feeling that are then modified by two main attitude types: extraversion and introversion. Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter, Isabel Briggs Myers began generating the questionnaire during World War II, believing that knowledge of personality preferences would help women who were entering the industrial workforce for the first time identify the sort of war-time jobs where they would be “most comfortable and effective”.

The idea that a set of questions with certain weighting that ask me about how I deal with certain situations and turns that into a four-letter personality type has been something that has always bemused and slightly annoyed me. Whether self discovery questions in Cosmo magazine or psychometric questionnaires that get you certain jobs depending on the results have remained a constant aggravating mystery to me. Yet I felt this was a challenge for me to overcome my anger and have personal experience to criticise against. As a result of this questionnaire I am an ENFP: an innovator and inspirer…allegedly!

Quantifying the Unquantifiable

The idea of quantifying the unquantifiable; the fluid thoughts and emotions of our everyday lives has in recent times become more and more popular as algorithms in social media focused applications have enabled us all to  invest and share data and act as conceptual self-knowledge mirrors. Originally used in organizational management, social media has enabled a more personal approach to help evaluate ourselves. Indeed the rise in self-help and self-knowledge have become a huge business and created opportunities for organisations and individuals to offer more and more self-reflective tools that allow them to record, quantify, reflect and evaluate on their everyday lives; their thoughts, feelings, mental and physical health. 

My original fascination came when I stumbled across Jonathan Harris & Sep Kamvar’s “We Feel Fine” project: An algorithm that collects around 20,000 feelings per day as expressed by the blogging community and splices up the feelings according to demographic information about the author of each feeling (age, gender, geographical location, and local weather conditions). It then presents these findings in a series of playful interfaces, each of which paints a different picture of human emotion.  Other applications/products/questionnaires have crunched this kind of qualitative, touchy feely soft data to allow you to see how good you are in bed, a rolling history of your sex life, your daily mundane activities calculated into graphical visualizations, psychological phenomena translated into quantifiable scales or your daily tweeted interests simply autoplotted into a diary format. The artist and designer Lucy Kimbell has also been investigating the evaluation cultures in management, technology and the arts; her performance/service: Free Evaluation Service is one example. And more recently Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly set up the Quantified Self program to enable self-quantifiers to meet and compare and analyse their own methods and processes of evaluation.

The Microtrend Diary: a Personal Futures Thought Experiment

The Microtrend Diary is kept in its own monthly slipcase

This initial interest in quantifying the absurdity of our feelings inspired me to consider how we might use these psychometric approaches to create personal futures services. What if you could create a self-reflective  diary that made use of our everyday thoughts to provoke us in such a way that you are able to change your future actions. As a thought experiment I devised ‘The Microtrend Diary’ during my final year on the MA Design  Interactions course in 2007 and have made a recent 2nd prototype. I am currently looking to develop this further with some initial user testing and then publish a small batch for distribution.

Daily self-fulfilling prophecy questions.

Inspired by the abundance of self-help books, self-discovery personality tests and psychometric questionnaires, the Microtrend Diary is a mirror of your daily actions and emotions that reveal provocative ways to alter your future actions. This personalised diary, is printed to order based on a set of preliminary personality questions. As the owner makes a daily record of their actions, a unique set of provocative aide memoirs are revealed under a perforated flap that suggest changing your behaviour in certain ways for the following day.

A perforated seal is torn open to reveal the daily self-fulfilling prophecy questions.

My Happiness Scale

Other pages in the diary include the hourly ‘happiness’ chart, ‘what will this day be?’ join the dots exercise, ‘crowdsourcing you future’ postcards to send to friends and a weekly ‘hopes & fears for the future’ scatter graph. After each week the diary owner is asked to plot their hopes and fear for the coming week and after each month these thoughts are plotted against a time series analysis graph identifying historical trends and pointers for the future. The self-fulfilling prophecy diary is printed weekly and each week is stored in it’s own dedicated monthly box.

Crowdsourcing Your Future: Two postcards sent to friends to plot their ideas of your own future against a timeline and a future history.

A self-addressed Futures History postcard sent to a friend and with the obligation to be returned a year later.

Futures Timeline Postcard sent to a friend with a blank timeline in order to be filled in and returned to sender.

The Self Help boom & the Happiness Cult

Tony Robbins: Motivational Speaker. Captured  from The Century of the Self

In last Sunday’s Observer, journalist Carole Cadwalladr, discussed the increase in the huge profiting market of selling happiness: the world of self-help.  Self help books used to be something my dad talked about in the early 90s that made me think he was a little strange and that it was just a way to fake his real self. Yet in some ways I have become to realise that there is some good in enabling people to self administer happiness much like how self medication has become more and more common with the help of the internet. Whether that actually increases paranoia and hypochondria is another matter.

Creating The FATE Institute, a fictitious personalised futures institute was a comment in some ways on the way we all want to have someone/something/somewhere to believe in and have the answers and know more about us than ourselves. For there to be someway to control and manage the unknown and know how to get what we want out of life using techniques, methods and knowledge from the diverse fields of ancient divination, corporate forecasting and personal genomics & genetic futures.

This Observer article describes how this common feeling we have has created an opportunity for psychologists, counsellors, hypnotherapists and entrepreneurs to use their skills and speak to a wider audience by creating their brand empire with books, weekend courses, DVDs etc and in doing so turn self help into a huge money making genre.

Self help means investing time and money to listen to a 3rd party agency describe our potential risks in the future and then explore ways to control it to essentially make us feel happy in the now. We will join societies, buy memberships, read the horoscope, hire foresight consultancies and futurists, read horizon scanning reports, subscribe to predictive gene testing services, listen to counsellors,

This article also reminded me of Adam Curtis’s doc, The Century of The Self and the way Edward Bernays applied Sigmund Freud’s understanding of  the subconscious to create the practice of public relations. Finding ways to understand and explore the self and introduce techniques to persuade and  encourage consumption and self obsession.  Unwittingly, his work served as the precursor to a world full of political spin doctors, marketing moguls, and society’s belief that the pursuit of satisfaction and happiness is man’s ultimate goal.

See also The World of Happiness post

Peter Schwartz by proxy supports the personalised futures methodologies of The FATE Institute

Future Implications: Is the future still the four box model?

Peter Schwartz, co-founder of the GBN and a key advocate for scenario planning recently wrote in Wired about how to apply the methods of scenario planning normally applied in a corporate horizon scanning to a personalised futures context much in the same way as FATE develops personalized forecasting with the help of The Delphi Party service and The Microtrends Diary.

As personal genomics continues to become more accessible and affordable, it has opened up another way of understanding ourselves in the future, enabling individuals to quantify and digitise their future health and real time activites. There has been a coming together of how we understand ourselves by the use of other methodologies that are normally used on a large scale. The services that form The FATE Institute experience are about applying corporate horizon scanning to our personalised futures.

Yet The FATE Institute is still not in actual practice but in research and prototype stage. The next steps for The FATE Institute is to evolve beyond its current scope of research …. but where?

Illumina launches own website and MyGenome iPhone application

How similar is my genome to Bill Gates.. what a scary thought.

At the recent Consumer Genetics Show, Illumina, a genomics technology provider of second-generation sequencing instruments (the Genome Analyzer II),  is launching a personal genome sequencing service via a new website; everygenome.com. The website discusses the processes of genotyping and DNA sequencing for individuals, doctors and scientists and will offer its service for $48,000 on its Genome Analyzer II platform.  It will conduct the sequencing at its laboratory  providing customers with a list of SNPs (single-nucleotide polymorphism) and structural variations in their genomes.

Illumina is the first sequencing-technology provider to open its service business to individual customers for non-research purposes and to consider how interpretation and comparison of ones genome could exist on the Iphone.

However Illumina does not provide interpretation services. The analysis and evaluation is where the spin begins, the disease- risk assessments, ancestry analyses and information about inherited traits.  It has instead  partnered with direct-to-consumer interpretative services offered by  23andMe, Navigenics, Decode Genetics, and Knome. Customers can select from these partners to receive interpretative packages of their data for an additional fee.

As it will only be a few years until the technologies that are being invested in will enable the the sequencing of our genomes to be cheap enough to buy in Boots, very cheap sequencing will rapidly result in a depletion of the sequence generation market as people will only need to get their genome sequenced once to have all the data they need in the world. So it is here that interpretation of this data that will be the “gift that keeps on giving…as new research uncovers more details about the functional portions of the genome and their interactions with environmental risk factors customers will always need their reports updated and re-analysed in increasingly more sophisticated ways.” This analysis will be a constantly evolving self-knowledge portal that can be tapped into as and when for the individual – creating a consistent re-reading of data. (via GenomicFutures)

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The FATE perspective

• The FATE institute recognize that this ability to learn more and more about ones genetic makeup and future health can consistently be updated and soon it wil be like reading your own horoscope in the Metro paper. The more and more we learn about ourselves the more we will only listen to what we want to hear, a DNA sequence interpretation will become very much like a coldreading, a form of mentalism wheer you listen out for what you want to hear. And in doing so it may or maynot motivate you to change the way you live.

• The FATE Institute believes that the more personal genome sequencing companies choose to invest in interpretations of SNP data as well as the technology the easier it will be for individuals to be able to choose how and by whom they want their future to be interpreted.

• Those start-ups and corporations who interpret their future each have their own motivations, branding and perspectives that taint the outcomes.They currently offer interpretative services that offer individuals a subscription to a fountain of their own self-knowledge that will continue to provide analysis about their own future lives indefinitely.

• However how will this change as the technology develops further and becomes accessible to all?

• What will be the impacts of an open source democratic approach to personal genome sequencing?

• How will this technology be harnessed if it leaves the large private sector laboratories and enters individuals homes and makeshift laboratories similar to those that are occurring in response to the synbiobrick era?

• Will citizen geneticists be able to sequence their genome and interpret the data in their own home, patent it using Science Commons licenses and sell their services on ebay or Amazon?

• What similarities and differences can we see between this possible future  and the open source approach in the software industry and the abilities for the web 2.0 to provide platforms for amateur activists and social entrepreneurs that exists outside of traditional corporations, start ups or  top down state structures?

Haynes Manuals go Galactic

This Haynes manual looks at the evolution and design of the mighty Saturn V rocket, the Command and Service Modules, and the Lunar Module. It describes the space suits worn by the crew and their special life support and communications systems. We learn about how the Apollo 11 mission was flown – from launch procedures to ‘flying’ the Saturn V and the ‘LEM’, and from moon walking to the earth re-entry procedure.

What other exploded drawings could be put into a manual? Could the products of FATE be a manual to download and distribute via science commons?

The old FATE machines at Carters Steam Fair

Doppelgangers: facebook clones

Jessica Ann Charlesworth form Australia recently asked me to be her friend. I wonder how her life will pan out and how previous Jessica Charlesworths have lived. Are there any similarities as to how they have lived their lives that may suggest how i might live mine? Could there be any DNA matching? Does it matter?

My ‘Post RCA Adventures’ Presentation

The Jessica Post RCA Adventure Happiness Diagram

A presentation given to the 1st and 2nd years of MA Design Interactions at the RCA about my Post RCA adventures since 2007. A great opportunity for reflecting on my past and deciding on my future. Quite a weird feeling going back to college but was nice to meet with the students especially to also be sharing my presentation time with Anab Jain and Susanna Soares. There was an overall optimistic feeling especially as these students will be graduating  smack bang in the middle of credit crunch. There was a group wave of joy as we all decided that these students wil be changing the face of recession and by their very enthusiasm and forward critical thinking approaches they will be creating the new design economy. Design is kicking ass at last!

Memory maybe stored in our dna and can be passed on to our offspring: is this where pastlives come from?

Could memories be stored by making modifications to your DNA? link

To remember a particular event, a specific sequence of neurons must fire at just the right time. For this to happen, neurons must be connected in a certain way by chemical junctions called synapses. But how they last over decades, given that proteins in the brain, including those that form synapses, are destroyed and replaced constantly, is a mystery. Now Courtney Miller and David Sweatt of the University of Alabama in Birmingham say that long-term memories may be preserved by a process called DNA methylation – the addition of chemical caps called methyl groups onto our DNA. With various experiments on mice using shock treatments, Miller and Sweatt   “_think we’re seeing short-term memories forming in the hippocampus and slowly turning into long-term memories in the cortex,” says Miller, who presented the results last week at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Washington DC.

Can experiences be passed on to offspring? link

What was your mother up to before you were even a twinkle in her eye? You might not think it matters, but it seems that in mice at least, mothers that receive mental training before they become pregnant can pass on its cognitive benefits to their young. Previous studies in both people and animals have shown that a mother’s experiences while pregnant can affect her offspring’s gene expression and health, even years later. However, it was not known if experiences prior to pregnancy had an effect. Larry Feig at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston and his colleagues bred “knockout” mice that lacked a gene called Ras-GRF-2, causing them to have a memory defect. Normally, if mice in a cage receive a shock to their feet, they freeze in fear if they are then placed back into the same cage. In contrast, Ras-GRF2 knockout mice did not associate the cage with fear.

The PGD (pre-implantation genetic diagnosis) Debate

The current news topics relating to PGD and the baby born without the breast cancer gene reflects some of the work I generated during my RCA design interactions degree 2005-2007.

In particular the P-Evo Clinic:

The Personal Evolution Clinic was a scenario generated during the FORESIGHT internship I was involved in during 2006. The P-Evo Clinic is the ultimate preventative measure against our obesity epidemic. P-EVO is a development of the Family Planning Association. It offers services to would-be parents, through DNA and genomic screening, to predict genetic variants in the not-yet-conceived child. Parents can prepare for possible special requirements their unborn child may need in an obesogenic environment. The experience of a visit to the P-EVO clinic is a rare blend of religious vision, health spa and theatrical spectacle.

and The Gene Ceremony

The Gene Ceremony from the FATE INSTITUTE is a ritualistic experience that focuses on the implications of predictive gene testing on our future health susceptibility. A variety of foods act as  DNA swabs to determine the likelihood of developing certain diseases or behavioural disorders. The ceremonial process ensures the experience of extracting the individuals genetic material is in line with the severity of the diagnostic information it reveals. The DNA material extracted from the jelly bone  will be used by the FATE INSTITUTE to test each participant for their susceptibility to contracting Alzheimers or breast cancer in the future. The diagnosis is one part of a custom made course of future therapy provided at the holisitic institute of the Futures Association for Therapy and Entertainment.

PGD news links

The first baby in the UK tested before conception for a genetic form of breast cancer has been born. Doctors at University College London said the girl and her mother were doing well following the birth this week.The embryo was screened for the altered BRCA1 gene, which would have meant the girl had a 80% chance of developing breast cancer. link

Genetic tests that can detect a raised risk of breast, ovarian and prostate cancer are being offered for the first time to people without family histories of the diseases, The Times has learnt. The programme, run by University College London (UCL), paves the way for a new approach to preventive medicine involving widespread screening. It will also prompt greater demand for screening of embryos by parents who carry a defective gene and want to avoid passing it to their children. News of the programme came as Paul Serhal, medical director at University College Hospital’s Assisted Conception Unit, announced the birth of one of the world’s first babies selected to be free of a genetic risk of breast cancer. link

The birth of the first British baby genetically screened before conception to be free of a breast cancer gene was hailed yesterday as a breakthrough by doctors but raised fresh questions about the ethics of creating so-called designer babies. The baby girl grew from an embryo screened to ensure that it did not contain the faulty BRCA1 gene, which would have meant she had a 50%-85% of developing breast cancer. link