Slow•Tech: Subverting The Attention Economy

Transcript

[Sydney]

Hi Everyone, Welcome to Slow Tech: Subverting the attention economy. My name is Syd and I'm based in the San Francisco Bay Area. I am a UX designer and researcher on the Alexa Shopping design team, helping shape the future of shopping through conversational AI.

My background in Architecture & Ethnic Studies allows me to bring a socicultural and technical perspective to ambient computing in the built environment. In my work, I dismantle social facades in order to build products and spaces with care.

[00:00] Brittany

Hi! My name is B and I’m a UX designer and technologist on the Amazon Chime team with AWS, based in Seattle. My background before this is in photography and fine arts. Taking pictures for a living trained me to spot beauty and wonder in the everyday, and the technical rigor of the medium continues to inform my creative practice.

Today we’re sharing two design experiments aimed at soothing the side effects of living in an attention economy, namely the drain on mental health caused by addictive tech products. Apps that are designed with a short-term goal of influencing human behavior to prolong engagement.

For example, We know too much social media leaves us feeling anxious and depleted. But we think advice to spend less time scrolling mis-places blame on individuals for over-using apps that are designed to be habit-forming.

Not to mention as daily technology users, we’re exposed to design patterns that manufacture urgency —like notifications, badge counts, auto-play, and swipe-to-refresh—in most of our digital utilities for communication, shopping, planning, and productivity.

[Sydney]

Pulling on research from our respective art backgrounds, B and I wondered: How can we give mental and emotional resources BACK to users? And could designing digital experiences help build self-awareness?

This is when we realized we had joined the Slow Tech movement. Which seeks to alter how humans interact with technologies including mobile devices, social media, email and other relatively recent innovations that tend to be highly addictive.

Based on our experiments, B and I developed three principles to maintain slow tech. Design idealistically (think blue skies), subvert the attention economy, and prioritize personal growth for the user, through continued practice and engagement with the experience.

[Sydney]

Our first experiment is Color Mood Shift. A virtual reality interface that lets people shape shift their environments in real-time based on their moods and body signals. The pandemic, along with many unprecedented changes in our lives, has caused many of us a rise in daily stress.

In my personal journey to prioritize my rest, I've found that using sunlight lamps has helped ease my anxiety. In case you aren't familiar with them, they simulate sunrise lighting toregulate your circadium rhythm and hormone levels in the body.

Over the course of using this device, it reminded me of the 1950’s Light & Space movement of artist James Turrell and literature from Eyes of the Skin by architect Juhani Pallasama. How they both explore the role of physical space in facilitating our feelings. And that by touching and embodying our environments, one can experience the world, even just by looking at it.

Inspired by these artists' work, I reflect on responses to our world of urgency as designers. For me, I hypothesize that people’s cognitive states are connected with how they interact with their physical space. So, I began to ask: How might color and environment heal an individual's anxiety? How might we immerse people into a mindful experience? One with sensation? How might we replicate a spiritual effect of color and light to ease people?

Through personal research, I found that one critical interface we often overlook is the human body. We can gain insight into our behavior through biofeedback, based on physiological signals. Some examples include sweat, heartbeat, or facial expressions, which can then be used to measure stress.

In this case, I examine Electrodermal Activity, or EDA, a biofeedback used to measure skin's electrodes. It’s similar logic is used in wearables like apple watches that track calories and sleep, and in turn we learn from our bodies data in hopes of improving our habits through self awareness.

In constructing Color Mood Shift, I used virtual reality as our system base to convert a person's EDA into visual simulations. By meditating with VR, users can temporarily change their space into a safe zone created by their mind. So when a person becomes anxious, they can easily close their eyes and immerse themselves in their personal room displayed by ambient colored lighting. The goal is to encourage people to pay attention to their own emotions based on the changing scenery, while being soothed by shifting light and colors around them.

Ultimately, this interface is designed to help people become more aware of their bodies' needs. As I move forward, I have more open questions: Like at what point do individuals become conscious of their mental state? How will they measure their personal growth over time? How can we scale our senses - such as extending the experience through private and public spaces?

This exploration of Color Mood Shift has reinforced the role art can play in bridging the gap between computing and humanities. That the design process cannot be purely business-oriented. Rather, design is a human process of returning to our intuition, senses, and feelings. Embracing Slow Tech principles, art and emotion become compass points, enabling us to learn self compassion and emotional awareness by immersing ourselves in color and extending our senses to our surroundings.

As a follow-up to this experiment, B will share another exploration for slow tech.

[Brittany]

This next concept is called Catch and Release. It’s an augmented reality based moth and butterfly collecting app, designed to help practice mindfulness and meditation. Meditation is often recommended to reduce stress and anxiety because it works, but learning those skills isn’t easy. Especially when you’re already mentally/emotionally depleted enough to seek treatment.

In my personal experience trying—and failing—to build a meditation habit, I found most apps rely on notification reminders, which makes daily practice feel like a chore. Missing several days in a row created feelings of guilt and failure. Drawing on our slow tech principles, I wanted to design an app where the motivation to pause and check-in with yourself is instead tied to caretaking instincts, anticipation, novelty, and, most of all, curiosity.

I picked a simple time based metaphor for the app—metamorphosis—and returned to a concept I’ve explored before through photography. Back in the day, I created a year long photo series by raising plants and insects in my home, including a handful of cocoons that hatched into giant silk moths, pictured here.

My photo thesis was based on biologist Edward Owen Wilson’s Biophilia Hypothesis, which proposed that human’s love of nature has a genetic basis. Alongside our instinctive fear responses to danger we also evolved a craving for aesthetic, intellectual, even spiritual meaning and satisfaction from nature.

Knowing humans have an innate attraction to living things, I wondered if I could leverage that fascination and design a meditation to self-induce a mindful state? My goal here is to provide an object of focus to slow racing thoughts, and help them find and sustain the elusive feeling of present moment awareness.

During a meditation session multiple senses are engaged to ground you in the present moment. Users can focus on the animated moth flying and moving unpredictably on their screen. The phone’s haptics will simulate fluttering wings, soft landings, and tiny steps to match the visuals. All this is backed by 360 degree spatial audio of soothing ambient nature.

To begin using this app regularly, all a user needs to do is find a quiet spot to “plant” a caterpillar. The caterpillar will stay tied to that place, and appear in AR. Superimposed on the scene as if it’s really there. Over time, they can return to that same spot to quietly observe their caterpillar grow. One day, it will spin a cocoon. Eventually, it will hatch into a moth or butterfly.

Depending on the natural lifespan of that species, one day the butterfly will expire and be added to a virtual collection inside the app. The user can view their collection anytime for proof of progress, and they can start a new meditation cycle by planting another caterpillar.

Users of this app can grow their collection by pausing to collect themselves, again and again, until that practice feels organic and natural. I don’t know what the output for this part of the experience will look like, but I do know what it should feel like: seeing progress and reflecting on growth. Not tracking minutes toward a weekly goal.

In the spirit of slow tech, the app deemphasizes quantitative achievements in favor of qualitative personal rituals. Metamorphic cycles are beautiful to observe, and they offer a reminder that the process is the point.

[Brittany]

For these two concepts, we bridged the gap between our day jobs as UX practitioners and our past experience in the arts, but every designer has plenty of human experience to pull from. We know that many in this field came to it from different avenues, just like us. Art is our avenue, because it poses more questions than it answers. And good art rewards you for slowing down and looking closely.

[Sydney]

Slow tech treats attention as a precious resource—because a person has only so much of it. As designers and as daily technology users, we can can look critically at design patterns alongside the their outcomes and ask ourselves: “Why am I paying attention, and how am I being rewarded?”

With that, we thank you for YOUR attention. We'd love to know what you think and invite you to check out our full length talk on the Design Breakfast Channel to gain a deeper understanding of our slow tech practice. Thank you.