Google dip their toes in ‘digital wellbeing’
As part of its “digital wellbeing” initiative, Google has developed a series of projects exploring our relationship with our devices.
Special Projects studio is the brain-child of the paper phone, which allows you to select all the necessary information you need for a day: maps, phone numbers, forecasts, calendars, sudoku, etc. Then you simply print it, fold it, and then ditch your phone for a day.
While the concept is excellent, I find the underlying logic a little problematic in the opaque relationship they have assumed between happiness, well being, and devices. This approach directly asserts phones = bad, and that they are somehow inherently wrong. Whereas phones provide not only a great deal of utility, but research continually shows, they can also create happiness and increase human connection. For me, the paper phone feels like it was designed to grab headlines and eyeballs, and not necessarily get us to question our relationship with devices and screen time.
The Desert Island project was developed inhouse by the Google Creative Lab, and asks the user, “if you were stuck on a desert island, what apps could you not live without?” After making your painstaking choices and weighing all the options, you can only access the chosen apps for twenty hours. Personally, this is a much more tenable ask of the user and forces a little more introspection on why and how we use our phone.
I’m going to give the Desert Island app a try next week, and tentatively, my app list consists of: phone, messages, email, slack, maps, Spotify, clock, camera.
One of the more compelling outcomes of these projects might have nothing to do with changing our habits, but instead the user research potential. In both projects, Google is essentially asking the users to card sort their most essential pieces of information (paper phone), and apps (desert island). Not sure how they would use this, but I’m sure a lot could be gleaned comparing this to the app usage data they are already gathering through android.
I’ve always thought that a minimal Punkt style phone, with maps, calendar, and a camera as good as the current Pixels would be my ideal device.
