Amy Orben: ‘To talk about smartphones affecting the brain is a slippery slope’
The psychologist Amy Orben talks about the widespread fear that smartphones are harmful to our wellbeing – and the difficulty of proving it
Category Devices
Designing for digital well-being
Smartphone attachment is so prevalent that the fear of being without a phone has a name: nomophobia, writes Elizabeth Churchill in Interactions. What can be done to manage such unhealthy attachments?
Anthropology of Smartphones and Smart Ageing
The Anthropology of Smartphones and Smart Ageing, a multi-sited research project based at UCL Anthropology, employs a team of 11 anthropologists conducting simultaneous 16-month ethnographies in Ireland, Italy, Cameroon, Uganda, Brazil, Chile, Al-Quds, China, and Japan.
[Book] The Next Billion Users: Digital Life Beyond the West
The Next Billion Users: Digital Life Beyond the West by Payal Arora Harvard University Press, 2019 280 pages A digital anthropologist examines the online lives of millions of people in China, India, Brazil, and across the Middle East—home to most…
[Book] Left to Our Own Devices
Left to Our Own Devices: Outsmarting Smart Technology to Reclaim Our Relationships, Health, and Focus Margaret E. Morris MIT Press, 2018 192 pages Unexpected ways that individuals adapt technology to reclaim what matters to them, from working through conflict with…
[Book] Left to Our Own Devices
Left to Our Own Devices: Outsmarting Smart Technology to Reclaim Our Relationships, Health, and Focus By Margaret E. Morris MIT Press, November 2018, 192 pages Unexpected ways that individuals adapt technology to reclaim what matters to them, from working through…
UX and Service Design for Connected Products
UX and Service Design for Connected Products by Claire Rowland Digital Catapult, 2018, 36 pages (via IoT.uk) There are a huge variety of applications in IoT spanning connected products and hardware enabled services. Consumer products such as home lighting and…
Ambient contextuality, the next big game-changer in technology interface
Jim Hunter, chief scientist and technology evangelist at Greenwave Systems, predicts in TechCrunch that the next big game-changer in technology interface is ambient contextuality. “Ambient contextuality hinges on the idea that there is information hidden all around us that helps…
[Book] The Qualified Self
The Qualified Self: Social Media and the Accounting of Everyday Life by Lee Humphreys MIT Press May 2018, 179 pages How sharing the mundane details of daily life did not start with Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube but with pocket diaries,…
A cultural approach to wearables (and the design opportunities it provides)
In January of this year, Sakari Tamminen and Elisabet Holmgren of the Finnish/USA innovation agency Gemic, published a paper on EPIC entitled “The Anthropology of Wearables: The Self, The Social, and the Autobiographical“. A wide range of new digital products…