Tongwen Ding

I'm Tongwen, an interactive designer from China. I have experience in user interfaces, user experience and game design.

- Don’t distract me is a virtual reality game consisting of an installation and a screen based game. To play the game, players have to put their phone in the installation and start the game -- a mountain maze. When people get notifications on their phones, some distractions will happen to prevent the player from winning the game. For example, the maze will keep shaking just as the phone vibration, the computer screen will flash to white so the players cannot see clearly and some walls will occur to block the way out the maze. At the same time, the player’s phone number will display on the computer screen, so the views around the player can text or call him to challenge the player. The whole process of the game shows a scene where people get distracted by their smartphone notifications when they are focusing on a task. The purpose of the game is to amplify the effect of distraction caused by smartphone notifications. In this case people can realize the impact of this kind of distraction to the things they are focusing on.
  
  My project doesn’t force people to stop checking smartphone notifications, because not all of the notifications are negative and people will have different views and behaviors towards a notification.