Taming Technology Through Design
We live in an ironic age where people and technology are so intertwined that I sometimes wonder if we really made the right decision to switch our eyes from all the excited and vast unknown around us to a black screen just a couple inches big. I was born in 1997, so I personally witnessed and lived through the divide. Growing up, I remembered all my best friends’ phone numbers so I could call them. A few months ago I was at a hospital filling out my emergency contacts and I was blanking on everyone’s cell — my mom, my dad, my best friends in the city, the guy that I’ve seen a couple times (not that I was planning to put him). I know that at a surface level it just shows that I have better things to remember, like my work stuff, events I’m going to, when does restaurant week in NYC start and end…?
Earlier this week I attended a wonderful talk hosted by betaworks exactly on this topic featuring Amber Case, a research fellow at the Institute For The Future and author of Calm Technology,. During the event we discussed the fundamental shift in the relationships between humanity and technology which inspired me to re-examine my interactions with technology every day. So here we go — a day in the life of Chialin: in the morning I wake up to SleepCycle, an app that tracks my movements and noises through my phone’s microphone when it wakes me up exactly at the end of a 90min sleep cycle which is…
