I finished reading Flow today, and took a few hours this afternoon to sample articles from the HCI literature that talk about flow (or related concepts like peak experiences or peak performance). I can't read more than a slice of this literature– a search on Google Scholar of "HCI" and "Csikszentmihalyi" returns a thousand articles published in the last decade alone, and Flow was first published twenty years ago– but I think I've got a sense of how the book has been read and used.

Before I get into that, though, I talked about the first half of the book already, so a quick overview of the rest. After talking about the properties of flow, he goes on to talk about bodily activities that lead to flow; flow in the mind; and flow in the workplace. After that he talks about solitude, adversity and optimal experiences– how some people take catastrophes and personal tragedies and turn them into opportunities for growth– and flow and the meaning of life. The happiest and most contented people, he argues, are able to turn most of life into an optimal experience.

So what do I learn from Flow that could help me in thinking about contemplative computing?

Most important, for all its influence, the book is somewhat under-utilitzed, and there's more we can do with it. Csikszenmihalyi is interested in really deep questions about what makes for a balanced life, and people have reduced him to a self-help author– Tony Robbins but with a really hard-to-pronounce name. In most HCI articles, though, his broader insights have been ignored, in favor of a much more utilitarian reading; while he is interested in understanding how optimal experiences make for more complex and satisfying lives, the lessons they've drawn are not "how can we design computers in ways that let users experience flow throughout their lives," but rather "how can we use flow to make e-commerce sites stickier"?

Now, there are parts of the book that invite such a reading: it's a testament to his clarity as a writer that his description of optimal experiences can be so easily extracted and used as design principles. However, it's a bit like reading the New Testament as a guide to entrepreneurship and viral marketing. Actually, this isn't that uncommon: Michael Lewis talks about how his book Liar's Poker was read by business majors as a how-to manual, not the chronicle of absurdity he meant it to be. (Come to think of it, a similar thing happened to Castiglione's The Courtier, too.)

This limited reading of Csikszentmihalyi nicely illuminates the gap in HCI that the human values crowd is trying to fill. Essentially, you can see the argument of works like Being Human, and more generally the call to pay attention to values in HCI, as a more faithful reading of Flow, and an attempt to engage with its bigger issues: to take flow and optimal experiences not as one-offs, or as forms of pleasure, but as something a lot more profound– properly understood, as steps to a richer and more satisfying life. In the first generation of HCI, when the objective was to make computers more accessible to non-technical types, and it was still a challenge to explain why ease of use should be taken seriously, this more utilitarian reading of Flow made sense. Now, though, we live in a world in which many of us spend a lot of time interacting with computers and other kinds of digital devices; in such a world, questions about how computers can be designed and used to help us lead better lives– better in a psychological and moral sense– are inescapable.

The good news is that Flow can serve as a bridge between these two strands of HCI. We can continue to mine the book to help us understand what frustrates people about computers, and what more satisfactory, engaged kinds of experiences would be like. We can use the book to think about ecologies of interaction, for one thing: we can build on the studies of individual human-computer interactions to ask how people juggling multiple devices in multiple contexts can have more flow-like experiences. We can also use it to help make sense of the Digital Cassandra arguments: better understanding what makes for engagement and mental absorption can help us better understand distraction, and where today's user experiences fall short. (I suspect what's so frustrating about the Web is not that it completely fails to promote flow, but that for many people it's flowish: being online is just enough like familiar mentally absorbing activities to promise something great, and consequently its failure to deliver is extra frustrating.) And we can use it to map out how mindfulness and self-experimentation can be used to improve digital flow experiences.