Decision Fatigue
I used to describe my inability to make a minuscule choice as brain fog. After learning about decision fatigue those moments made more sense to me. This year has been a year of nonstop change and life altering decisions for my long term future. I worked on my Undergraduate Thesis and decided to go to Graduate School this year. Things such as moving across the country and which apartment to rent for a year didn’t seem that difficult but, the decision on what peanut butter to get while in a busy grocery store left me frozen in the aisle.
Decision Fatigue has been loosely defined as the deteriorating quality of decisions made by an individual after a long session of decision making. It’s a topic that has been on my mind consistently for the last few months. So for this prompt instead of choosing a choice, I aimed to represent the lack of ability to choose.
images: the starter phases where I was working on learning how to add text dynamically | reference page that assisted with learning how to maneuver text
My first idea was to create an interactive mouse that when hovered in a specific area and would have text appear. This felt too simple for what I wanted to convey. To work through the concept I started asking myself questions. One question became ten then twenty and I found myself overwhelmed with making a choice about how to represent choices.
Using the stroke feature I had the mouse produce a line as it moved around and every time the viewer would attempt to answer a question, another appears in a random position. The only way to answer was to press the mouse in that attempt to answer another question arises and what is left is a never ending maze that doesn’t seem to have an end in sight.
images: left - an image of how the stroke feature looks before adding the text, right - an image of the final product when the viewer decides they’ve had enough as this will loop until the entire canvas is fully covered by the strokes
video: a screen capture of the activity being used from the start
References:
NYT Article: Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue? by John Tierny
The Psychology of Economic Decisions published by New York : Oxford University Press
Example - Random Text Generator - new font linked by enickles
