Good Tech? Bad Tech? Mindful Tech at Dragon Cafe Today

 

STOP THE WORLD I WANT TO GET OFF!  We can be quite overwhelmed by all the information that enters our brains at any one time.  Check out this video called Digital Junkie which gives some quite alarming stats. The funniest being that most people would rather clean their toilet than clear out their email inbox!

Mindful computing can be very helpful. Sitting down to your laptop or computer with just one task in mind. Creating the conditions around that task to ensure you stay on track ie: switch off email, switch of IM, shut down all other windows and just do THAT ONE THING.  Guess what? The work will get done much more efficiently, with more ease and less errors.  Try this quick experiment here to see the impact of multitasking.

Dragon Café Timetable May 8th – Click to enlarge

At Dragon Café today you can try out a Digi Detox workshop with Orianna Fielding.  Orianna is the founder of The Digital Detox Company and author of “Unplugged: How to Live Mindfully in the Digital World“. She’ll be giving some awesome tips on how to work more effectively with your tech in her workshop at 5.30pm and then at the panel discussion (starting at 7pm).

 

Also attending for this panel is Tony Langford from Kinetica Museum. Tony is an Academic Associate at the Fovolab in Cardiff.  This group researches the benefits of new technologies on health and wellbeing. He is interested in how creative applications of new tech can improve self-awareness and mindful attention to our present moment experience.  He is exploring how immersive, augmented and virtual realities might work to help us develop mindfulness skills and how we can become more aware of what lies “just outside” our awareness by developing peripheral visual skills.  Tony is on the panel tonight but will run a workshop at Dragon Café May 22nd (time tbd, updates will be on this page).

 

You can also join the amazing @lizfinegold sharing a mindful reworking of some old skool Japanese sewing techniques with her mindful sewing experience. Join this one hour workshop to discover the power of mindful movements and creating to help still the mind and create a sense of relaxed alertness.

 

Tamara Russell will close the evening panel with some “slo mo” mindful movements related to tech use. Our behaviours, emotions and thoughts come out into the world through our bodies. If we can move mindfully (and slowly) we can interrupt some of our most engrained habits.  These movements are based on principles described in Tamara’s book “Mindfulness in Motion“.

 

 

Information Superhighways ……