Post # 4 Project II: Blink

I have chosen the book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell. Blink popularizes research from psychology and behavioral economics on the adaptive unconscious; mental processes that work rapidly and automatically from relatively little information. I find it interesting that Gladwell supports the argument that our ability as humans to “gauge what is really important” from little to no experience is very strong in which he coins as “thin-slicing.” He claims that our brains are overloaded with too much information everyday which clouds our innate sense of judgment at times. He contends that in this age of information overload, experts tend to make better decisions with snap judgments than they do with “volumes of analysis.”


One of the main reasons why I wanted to pick this book is because it is a non-linear story, nonfiction, and is about psychology. Therefore, its relationship to this new media form called the internet would be relevant in terms of a Flash presentation. The level of interactivity is greater simply because the book shows numerous examples and data of how our snap judgments are often better than our over-analyzed decisions.

The project’s idea line will be based off of Gladwell’s theory. Partly inspired from G. Lee’s Typoorganism project, I would like for the homepage to encourage the audience to click on a category icon. Within the several categories will be decisions the audience has to make based on their first instinct. Since this Gladwell’s book deals with time, I would like incorporate time in my piece. For example, the longer the user takes to make a decision, the likelihood of him picking the wrong answer increases. I am visualizing colorful circles and text that pop out like bubbles and move around which represent all of the choices the user has to make. There will be a right answer and several wrong ones. It should depend on how quickly the person picks the bubble. Although implementing disappearing time in the piece may be technically difficult for me as a beginner in Flash, I would like to see this happen.