Using technology to slow down the world
In our studio in the west port area of Amsterdam, we are building a new kind of business: a slowtech business. In this place we work with the brightest minds to research, design and develop new ways to use technology with a single purpose: slowing down the world.
In the past years many designers and technologists have applauded Zuckerberg's adagium: "Move fast and break things." Today we know what happens when the sole purpose is to get people's attention and sell this to companies and politicians who are sometimes keen to leave facts out of the picture. This creates a more divisive and less connected world. Exactly the opposite of Zuckerberg’s claim that Facebook and its subsidiaries are about “connecting people”.
We've seen how these technologies have led to lower voter turnout in the US in 2016 (by for example using dark posts to demotivate african American voters to vote for ‘racist’ Hillary) and how they kept feeding people posts they already agreed on, to keep us senselessly scrolling through our timelines.
We believe that the same technology that big tech uses to divide us, can be used to bring us together. To create a world that slows down, and opens up real conversations between people in the real world. Away from the screen. Leveraging a new kind of potential for technology.
With the Chairwave we've shown in 2019 how you can use design and tech to make more encounters happen in the physical world. Chairwave is an interactive row of chairs that only opens seats next to others. As soon as you sit down on the Chairwave, the chairs next to you unfold. Making people sit only next to each other lowers the barrier to start a conversation which makes people stop looking at their phone. The playful interaction of the Chairwave, combined with the light design, creates a reason to converse with others (in the scientific world this effect is also called triangulation).
What we've done with the Chairwave we want to continue exploring with other inventions, concepts and researches. We call this Slowtech: Using tech to slow down the world around us.
Many people might argue that moving faster equals progress: less waiting time, faster decisions, more options, more freedom, better recommendations, immediate delivery, getting rid of the expensive middle man. We do believe technology brings a lot of benefits, but the world we've created is one where we don’t understand each other anymore. A world where senseless consumerism is pushed through on a daily base by good-looking but unhappy influencers. The world big tech has brought us is a hollow and empty world, where we don’t recognize other people’s views anymore, because we interact less and less with each other. We are put away as data points in a big dataset.
"To understand is to be free.", stated Spinoza in 17th century Amsterdam. But it seems that new technologies are taking away our time to truly understand, that's why we need to slow things down. Only then we can be free.