Extending a Theory of Slow Technology for Design through Artifact Analysis

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Acknowledgments

This research would not have been possible without the collaboration and support from many colleagues, which we acknowledge next. Mark Selby for their original work on the Photobox design and Abigail Sellen, Richard Banks, David Kirk, and Tim Regan for their contributions to the Photobox project. Jeroen Hol, Bram Naus, and Pepijn Verburg for their original work on the Olly design and Ron Wakkary for their contribution. Ishac Bertran for their original work on the Slow Games concept, and Garnet Hertz, Matthew Harkness, Henry Lin, and Perry Tan for their contributions to the small batch production of Slow Game research products. Wenn-Chieh Tsai, Sheng-Yang Hsu, and Rung-Huei Liang for their contributions to the CrescendoMessage project. Tijs Duel for their collaboration on the Olo Radio design, and Minyoung Yoo, Henry Lin, and Tal Amram for their contributions in the small batch production of Olo Radio research products. Ce Zhong and Henry Lin for their contributions in the small batch production of Chronoscope research products. This research was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), The Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI), 4TU Design United, and Microsoft Research.

Notes

¹ Deeper philosophical discussions on felt experiential or phenomenological time can be found in the works of Heidegger, Bergson, Husserl, and Ricoeur. See Martineau (2015) for an in depth review of these philosophical lines of thought and their relation to earlier influential philosophical positions on time from Aristotle and Augustine.

² Following Lewis (1983), our use of the term “intrinsic” is in the philosophical sense — a quality that a thing has in-and-of-itself, independent of other things.

³ Olly (and also our Olo Radio design artifact) works by linking to a user’s Last.FM account. Last.FM is a free web-based application that runs across a user’s personal computer, smartphone, and peripherals to generate precise records of each song they have listened to in terms of the time, date, artist, song, and album (e.g., if listened through Spotify, iTunes, etc.). In existence since 2002, Last.FM offers unprecedented access to its users’ listening histories. We also decided to use Last.FM data because it is a relatively open platform which makes it easier to work with listening history data (e.g., as opposed to Spotify or other listening services that do not allow end users to download or access their entire listening history data in a raw form).

⁴ Although Olly randomly selects instances of songs listened to previously in its user’s life and this data ages over time, the system structures the listening history archive chronologically. For example, when the user listens to music in their everyday life (outside of using Olly) and it is recorded in their listening history archive, these instances are simply the ‘newest’ ones introduced into the archive along a linear timeline. They do not form temporal connections to other songs in the archive except in relation to how old or recent they are to relation each other. The concept of temporal interconnectedness – where digital media or data form connections across multiple dimensions chronological and non-chronological time simultaneously – is motivated and exemplified later through the Olo Radio and Chronoscope projects.

⁵ See Betran’s website for in depth documentation and description of his original project that precedes the Slow Game research product project described in this article: http://www.ishback.com/slowgames/index.html.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Canada Foundation for Innovation; Microsoft Research; Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada [RGPIN-2018-06273]; Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [435-2020-0752].

Notes on contributors

William Odom

William Odom ([email protected], www.willodom.com) is a researcher with an interest in slow technology, temporality, and design for everyday life; he is an Assistant Professor in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology of Simon Fraser University.

Erik Stolterman

Erik Stolterman ([email protected], https://luddy.indiana.edu/contact/profile/?profile_id=305) is a researcher with an interest in philosophy and theory of design; he is a Professor and Senior Executive Associate Dean in the School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering of Indiana University and a professor at the Institute of Design at Umeå University.

Amy Yo Sue Chen

Amy Yo Sue Chen ([email protected], https://aychendot.wordpress.com/) is a researcher with an interest in temporal design; she is working toward her PhD in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology of Simon Fraser University.