Attending to Slowness and Temporality with Olly and Slow Game

Abstract

Slowness has emerged as a rich lens to frame HCI investigations into supporting longer-term humantechnology relations. Yet, there is a need to further address how we design for slowness on conceptual and practical levels. Drawing on the concepts of unawareness, intersections, and ensembles, we contribute an investigation into designing for slowness and temporality grounded in design practice through two cases: Olly and Slow Game. We designed these artifacts over two and a half years with careful attention to how the set of concepts influenced key design decisions in terms of their form, materials, and computational qualities. Our designer-researcher approach revealed that, when put into practice, the concepts helped generatively grapple with slowness and temporality, but are in need of further development to be mobilized for design. We critically reflect on insights emerging across our practice-based research to reflexively refine the concepts and better support future HCI research and practice.

Dislocated Boardgames: Design Potentials for Remote Tangible Play

“…Research on "slow technology" [64,65] informed the design of artifacts centered around different manifestations of time by, e.g., deliberately slowing down interactions with technology. Following this line of thought, gameplay artifacts and components could be designed towards embodying the quality of time "between" players as well as utilizing different notions of time as a material (e.g., designing with new interactional constraints like allowing only one action per day [66]).…”

My Naturewatch Camera

“…In previous projects, some researchers have turned to batch production to increase the number of people who can try the research products they create, both to permit large-scale field studies and to disseminate the ideas they embody [5,15,31,35]. Batch production, however, is costly and time-consuming, and for digital devices typically remains quite limited in the numbers of devices that can be made-for instance, even the large scale Datacatcher project only produced 130 devices [15].…”

Research Through Design: A Promising Methodology for Engineering Education

“…We refer to RtD as a methodology, rather than a method, because it represents large variety of practices aligned by an "emphasis on the importance of creating design artifacts as a means to uncover new knowledge that could not have been arrived at otherwise" [13]. Zimmerman and Forlizzi suggest several categories of RtD -lab, field, or showroom [2].…”

“…Zimmerman and Forlizzi suggest several categories of RtD -lab, field, or showroom [2]. Practitioners of RtD describe a variety of methods that extend or fall under the broad umbrella of RtD such as design fictions [14], critical design [2], speculative design [15], research products [13][16], material speculation [13] [17], embodied design ideation [15], critical making [15], participatory RtD [12], collaborative futuring [18], and research through explorative design [19].…”

“…Ludic engagements are "activities motivated by curiosity, exploration, and reflection rather than externally defined tasks" [23:885]. Other areas of design include design for "slow" [13][25] interactions, "collaborative survival" [15], "touch" [26], and "personal and interpersonal connections" [27].…”