21 Jul ATTENTION AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF DIGITAL EXPERIENCE
Attention and the Architecture of Digital Experience equips students to understand, direct, and protect their attention in digital environments designed to fragment it.
Rather than treating attention as an individual weakness or a scarce resource within the “Attention Economy,” this seminar examines how digital systems are architected to shape, steer, and monetize human focus. Students analyse the economic, technological, and psychological structures that organise contemporary digital experience.
The course moves from analysis to practice. Students study surveillance capitalism, behavioral surplus, and interface design patterns that shape behavior, then develop strategies to reclaim agency over their attention through structured exercises and sustained aesthetic practice.
This seminar benefits students across disciplines by treating attention as a core professional competency. It draws on academic traditions of disciplined observation and aesthetic inquiry, from Enlightenment practices of focused study and 19th-century models of sustained looking to contemporary collective protocols such as the Order of the Third Bird, a practice associated with scholars at Princeton University and rooted in longer histories of attentive scholarship.
Based on our learning-by-doing methodology, the course is workshop-based. Attention is practiced, not just discussed. Through Attention Audits, Trigger Mapping, Deep Listening, and collective looking protocols, students move from passive participants in digital systems to reflective agents capable of shaping their own attentional environments.
In a professional landscape defined by distraction, the ability to direct and sustain attention becomes a decisive competitive advantage.
DENNIS NEIMAN
Dennis Neiman has dedicated his 30-year marketing career to digital formats, platforms, and content.
As Head of Innovation at the Spanish digital agency MPC, he introduced and implemented emerging technologies for clients, including gamified intranets, international inbound marketing, social media marketing, and AI conversational marketing. He has developed synthetic influencers and investigates affective computing for marketing.
As a professor at IE, he has taught courses in User Experience and Personalization, UX/UI in Interactive Projects, Multimedia Narrative and Interactive Design, and Disruptive Thinking within Digital Transformation.
He attended the University of Illinois and holds a bachelor’s degree in Psychology and Advertising. After dedicating his advertising career to capturing attention, he now wants to give it back — shifting from extracting attention to teaching how to reclaim and inhabit it fully.
Skills
By the end of the course, students will be able to:
– Understand how digital systems are designed to capture and direct attention, and recognise when their focus is being shaped without their consent.
– Diagnose their own distraction patterns by conducting structured attention audits and identifying internal and external triggers.
– Reduce digital overwhelm by applying strategies of Critical Ignoring and Lateral Reading to filter information efficiently and intelligently.
– Improve cognitive performance by understanding the cost of multitasking and practising sustained attention in high-focus environments.
– Build practical systems — personal or collective — that protect attention as a professional asset rather than allowing it to be continuously extracted.
Schedule
Which dates?
04-mar
11-mar
18-mar
08-apr
15-apr
22-apr
What day?
THURSDAYS
What time?
9.30-11.00
