Attending to Slowness and Temporality with Olly and Slow Game: A Design Inquiry Into Supporting Longer-Term Relations With Everyday Computational Objects

Slowness has emerged as a rich lens to frame HCI investigations into supporting longer-term human-technology 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.