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Going Slow

Client

Gilly Leshed, Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Communication, gl87@cornell.edu

CS 5150 contacts

The following CS 5150 students are interested in building a team for this project. Please contact them if you are would like to join the team:

Nikhil Nawathe <ngn9@cornell.edu>
Justin Cheng <jc882@cornell.edu>

Project

The purpose of this project is to help people slow down their lives against social and cultural mainstream pressures of busyness, rush, efficiency, and productivity. The team will develop an application that helps people reflect on their level of “busyness” and help them slow down.

The development team will work with the client:

• To determine the test group of users (e.g., office workers, busy mothers, students, etc.)
• Choose the domain(s) to implement “slow” software for (e.g., email, calendars, to-do lists, mobile devices, etc., either for the office or for domestic environments).
• Select the most suitable way to package the application (e.g., as a phone application, a stand-alone web application, or an add-on to an existing application, such as Thunderbird).
• Design the system, from the user interface through the architecture, following requirements to support slowness, flexibility, identity and personalization, and user control.
• Implement the design both as a prototype and the final release, using the platform and programming language agreed upon.
• Deploy the software to target users in real life settings and evaluation of impact.

User tests will be run with a prototype version and the final version will be refined to a level that can be released widely.

Background

From email, through cell phones, instant messaging, online calendars, and the social web, more and more technologies in everyday life are affecting experiences of time. On the one hand, technologies are designed to free us from hard labor and save us time by helping us become more productive and efficient. However, this can easily lead to fragmentation and micro-coordination of work, make accessible an overabundance of information, products and services among which we feel obligated to choose properly, and increase our availability to anyone, anytime and anywhere. This, in turn, may support the “speeding up” of life and an increasing sense of rush and overload.

Objective

Can technology be purposely designed to support a fundamental human need to slow down, cut back, procrastinate, slack, or be inefficient? This need exists both in task-centric workplace environments and in busy homes with multiple family members coordinating their activities. The purpose of this project is to open a window for slowing down against social and cultural mainstream norms of busyness, rush, efficiency, and productivity. 

Examples that may be thought of as related are Remember The Milk (www.rememberthemilk.com) and RescueTime (www.rescuetime.com). But these technologies are rooted in the assumption that they will help us be more efficient and more productive, thus enabling to juggle even more things in our day. On the other hand, in Real Snail Mail (www.realsnailmail.net), for example, snails physically deliver emails using RFID chips glued to their shells from a dispatch point to a drop off point. Downsides to slow email, for instance, an announcement about an event arriving after the event occurred, might evoke reflection on one’s level of commitment and about opportunities against losses with slow technology.

This project will develop software that helps people reflect on their level of “busyness” and help them slow down. Depending on the team’s decision, it could be implemented as a phone application, a web application, or an add-on to an existing application (e.g., Thunderbird). Once developed, the team will be involved in releasing the application to the decided target users (office workers, busy mothers, students, etc.) and evaluating its impact on the users’ life.

The broader impact of this project is in its potential to improve the well being of millions of people struggling and juggling through their busy lives.