Slowing Down Communication: Designs Inspired by Quality, Intimacy, and Humanity

Stefan Agamanolis explores how the same design thinking that led to fast food has led to the modern mobile phone. Based on his work at MIT and Distance Lab, he reports on some trends in communication design that lead in a different direction. Examples will include sports games you play over a distance, telephones crossed with flotation tanks, and communication systems designed for a bedroom environment. He will introduce the notion of "slow communication", an extension of ideas from the Slow Food movement into the design of communication technologies and techniques that suggests that the broad palette of technologies at our disposal and the increasingly wide availability of bandwidth have not been exploited nearly to the degree that they could be to provide us with communication experiences that are higher in quality, tailored to the nature of the relationship or context, and enable a greater sense of intimacy and immersion.