For our second Applied Experiment, we supported the development of Ping Practice, a not-for-profit journaling method and app.

Refined through years of experimentation and conversations, Ping Practice encourages you to "take pictures" of placeless thoughts so that you can more easily return to them later.

Like taking a screenshot of your mind

You can think of the Ping Practice app like a camera.

When you feel moved by a thought, idea, feeling, etc., Ping Practice invites you to type it out and let it go. We call these “messages from the universe” — Pings.

No tagging. In these fleeting moments, you are simply creating a breadcrumb for your future self.

A place for placeless thoughts

The app places Pings in time and logs metadata about the moments they emerge within. This way, you can find your way back and navigate around just like you would in your phone’s camera roll.

Decouple sensing and sense-making

When you are ready to revisit, Ping Practice offers a couple of ways to browse…

If you are looking for something specific, you can quickly search across your entire corpus of pings.

If you are wanting to wander, you can swipe through a range of filters the Ping Practice app automatically builds for you.

Regardless of how you arrive, when you happen upon a Ping that speaks to you, the app enables you to:

1. Browse others like it by tapping the Ping's metadata

2. Re-Ping Pings you want to remember

3. Reply to Pings there is more to say about

4. Hide Pings you would like some distance from

Private, offline and always available

The Ping Practice app works entirely offline.

This means Pings are stored, and automatically backed up, to a CSV file on your device.

Wisdom surfaces in our senses

Ping Practice assumes wisdom surfaces in our senses and becomes coherent through reflection.

This app is taking form in a moment where the power of reflection and journaling is known and how to integrate these practices into daily life remains a challenge.

Ping Practice bridges this gap by drawing on our familiarity with cameras and reimagining them as tools for inner exploration.

With support from APOSSIBLE, the Ping Practice Team has been able to transform the first three steps of the Ping Practice Method into an app we can now all try.

Join the Ping Practice Beta

Related Research

In one sense Ping Practice helps us tune into what we are feeling while becoming more mindful observers of our thoughts. But Ping Practice is also a tool for processing experiences and learning about ourselves.

James Pennebaker’s seminal work on the therapeutic effects of expressive writing show that externalizing thoughts and feelings reduces stress and enhances cognitive functioning. White and Epston’s Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends builds on Pennebaker, showing how the expression of inner states in writing gives us perspective and ultimately creative agency in determining what our thoughts and feelings mean and how we will make sense of them.

APOSSIBLE will continue to explore how technologies might enable us to seek out this agency, and exercise our inquisitiveness and care for our own thoughts. For now, we leave you our reading list to research along with us:

• [ paper ] 2011
  Expressive Writing: connections to physical and mental health
  by Pennebaker, J. W., & Chung, C. K.
  A broad overview of the expressive writing paradigm; looking at the effects on health and well-being of individuals writing about their experiences.
• [ book ] 1990
  Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends
  by Michael White, David Epston
  Building on Pennebaker, White and Epston explore how the expression of inner states in writing gives us perspective and ultimately creative agency.
• [ book ] 1983
  The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action
  by Donald A. Schön
  This seminal work by M.I.T. social scientist Schön looks from a professional point of view at the benefits of 'reflection-in-action' and how it works.
• [ book ] 2016
  When We Are No More: How Digital Memory Is Shaping Our Future
  by Abby Smith Rumsey
  "We use technology to accumulate facts about the natural and social worlds. But facts are only incidental to memory.”
• [ paper ] 1998
  The Extended Mind
  by Andy Clark and David Chalmers
  Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin? This original paper that later became a book explores “The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain.”
• [ book ] 1994
  Thought as a System
  by David Bohm
  "...if you have found the words which express the way you are actually thinking, the body will be affected."
• [ concept ] 1960
  Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle
  by C.G. Jung (written about by Joe Cambray)
  A theory of meaningful coincidences where “internal, psychological events are linked to external world events by meaningful coincidences rather than causal chains.”

Follow the Ping Practice journey here.

• Team
  Carolyn Li-Madeo
  Elliott Etzkorn
  Jeffrey Noh
  Laurel Schwulst*
  Nicolas Ayoub
  Peter Pelberg*
• Supported as part of
  APOSSIBLE Applied Experiments
  
• * Project Lead