Three decades ago, a frustrated young filmmaker named George Lucas, freshly graduated from UCLA’s film school, wanted to create an alternative to the established genre of action films coming out of Hollywood. Unable to find a compelling plot line, he picked up a copy of a book by the mythologist Joseph Campbell, Hero with a Thousand Faces.  It was about the Heroes’ Quest, common to many spiritual traditions, in which youth would go out into the world to take on the forces of evil.

In Campbell’s vision, the Hero’s aim wasn’t to destroy the bad guys. It was to meet their power head on, to restore the goodness in the darkest souls – to save them, not kill them as one does blithely in today’s computer games. In the process both good guys and bad guys meet their own fears and become transformed.

Thus, emerged Lucas’ Star Wars saga. It broke box office records and made a visceral  impact on me as a youth. Emerging from the darkened theatre, I felt empowered.

Nowadays, the entire media industry – armed with an exponential rise in computing power – are as frustrated as the young George Lucas. How can they use this power to provide immersive, meaningful experiences for users? How to empower them rather than addict them?

Such questions are behind a new approach to technology design called Meaningful Technologies (Meaningful Technologies.com) that I’ve been developing with leaders in the worldwide field of Human Computer Interaction, notably Jeff Wong at Carnegie Mellon University. These ideas are not yet at the beta-testing stage. But our vision is that one day they will become integrated into new technologists for education, health care, multimedia, home design, computer search -- and for religion itself. As Indonesians become powered with broadband, our challenge will be to draw from this emerging field the insights about how to develop technology applications that are meaningful specifically to Indonesian users and fit the context of its archipelago.

To Satisfy Users, Designers Must Tap Spirituality

Forget whatever associations you might have between spirituality and religion. Spiritual computing is about experience – making it meaningful. It is an underlying principle of the design innovations being established by Investor Group Against Digital Divide (IGADD) and introduced in a November conference on “spiritual computing” at Institute of Technology Bandung. The framework draws upon Indonesia’s rich spiritual and cultural legacies, and that of other robust spiritual traditions, to turn the country into a hub for inspiring software applications that could be exported to the world. 

Within this framework will emerge Islamic Computing, the basis for a major international conference to be organized by IGADD next year.

It turns out that for thousands of years robust spiritual traditions such as Islam have developed enormous expertise on the matter of how to enhance the quality of users. Spiritual computing challenges technology designers to do just that.  

Several years ago, when technologies realized that “user experience” was now the driving force of technology design, the term UX, for user experience began to be common parlance among the techies in laboratories of Microsoft, Nokia, Google and Intel. We hope to push the boundaries of that field, introducing something called Meaningful User Experience (MUX).

My Own Personal Quest

Over the past two years, I’ve been on my own personal quest into the meaning of this new paradigm. It has led me far from my home base (at the University of Washington Human Interface Technology Laboratory in Seattle) to the world’s most significant technology laboratories, where brilliant young computer scientists are shaping next generation technologies. Finally, the quest brought me to Asia, the well spring of some of the world’s greatest and most enduring spiritual traditions which I believe to be the most potent geographic base for the spiritual computing paradigm.

At each stop I arrived to provide lectures without a snazzy PowerPoint. Knowing that my theme would arouse interest,  I simply posed the question my audiences if they thought the two words “spiritual” and “computing” could be amicably co-joined -- and become the basis for a new line of products and services.

Google Ponders the Meaning of Search

My first stop was Google. Since they are in the search business. Google-ites were very interested in discussing Campbell’s concept of spiritual search and how it might help them anticipate what to do with the Semantic Web, the next innovation in the worldwide web, which is supposed to bring meaning to the computerized searches.

“I guess we have to begin with the realization that users don’t really know what they really want when a computer search begins, and that somehow the meaning of the search has to arise through the process,” said one insightful  Google employee. “As designers, we have to know enough about users to help them find wisdom even when they think all they want is mere data.”

Google invited me back and next time the theme was “sacred space.” And guess who showed up in full force? The Google earth team, which was looking ahead to the next generation of GPS technologies. Perhaps it was the first time any one had linked GPS with spirituality but the room buzzed with excitement. “So far we are just able to help users zoom in to a specific location. Our next step is to help them share with each other the meaning of the physical locations they care about.” Hint: watch for a new link called “sacred space” on the Google earth home page.

Sacred Space at Microsoft

My next stop was close to my home, Redmond, Washington’s Microsoft. This time I found myself face to face with those designing the the company’s secretive Digital Home of the Future. “So far, we have used the principle of ‘ease of use’ as our criteria for what users want – like having their bath water filled for them at the right temperature as soon as they arrive home from work,” said one member of the team. “But after this discussion I’m going to design a special room just for meditation. We’ll use sensor networks to shape the users’ experience.

And so it went. At Intel Research Labs in Portland, the focus was on bringing mindfulness principles into the design of technologies for chronically ill elderly. At Yahoo, the focus was on integrating spiritual ideas into Flickr, where users tell stories through the placement of photographs. At Nokia in Finland, which had just released the source code of the Symbian operating system of its high-end phones, the focus was on helping users design their own mobile reminders to return to mindful awareness during the course of their day.

Social Networking for Ramadan in Indonesia

At wasn’t till my lecture tour brought me to Asia that I began to get really excited about what spiritual computing might mean for emerging markets. In Indonesia, at the country’s flagship technology university called Institute of Technology Bandung, I asked a bunch of digital entrepreneurs if they would identify the “killer ap” for Indonesia once broadband becomes pervasive in the country. The answer: a social networking site that would allow users to share the experience of Ramadan.

Clearly, as holders of the world’s most significant spiritual traditions, Asian technologists  surely help its own users find the inner meaning of their own traditions, not just as religious rituals, but as practical guidelines for everyday life and the basis for spiritual friendships.

Maybe we can work together to turn these ideas into technologies that do for us what Joseph Cambell did for George Lucas. 

May the Force be with us.