Eyes Up & Out of the Box
Ethos for Technology & Interaction Design
I have a problem with my phone.
After spending 15 minutes doing anything with that device, I start to feel a certain vital soul energy being sapped — most of my body is on a kind of idle, or standby, while scrolling or reviewing or drafting something or another. The attention the device and overlaid tech are designed to farm from me has a strange… embodied tax.
If I haven’t lost you, you might be able to see why we need a guiding ethos around tech and experience design that
brings
our gaze up from the depths and
our interactions into the light of day with each other,
with the built world around us,
and through a harmony across our senses
(Rather than a repression of our human form.)
I’ll explain:
Conversation, Relation, and Design
To best understand what I am sharing,
Please first indulge yourself in something.
In this moment, rest your gaze and “take a bite” of something — a lovely metaphorical morsel that delights you. Stretch, breathe, relieve yourself.
I am going with something sweet next to me. A glorious excuse for a cinnamon roll — gluten free, dairy free — that compensates for lack of nuanced flavor with a bunch of sugar.
Note: There’s always a market for well-textured breadstuffs in the Gluten Free / GF community, you just have to… navigate the sea of stale whales ( @Udi’s, Schar, etc.).
*** a moment is had away from screen ***
I am assuming that if you did hold a moment, or at the least imagined what you might fancy in a self-indulgent moment, that it happened away from your device, not by way of your device.
Conversation
You entered in to “conversation” with something, in that moment. A drink of water is a conversation with your vessel of choice, as well with the water, the air around you, and the table where your little nalgene bottle sits.
The conversation is an exchange. A back-and-forth. Architecture does the same thing with us — we visit or walk by and we feel the presence and emotional intent of the structure.
Relation
Relation happens along with conversation. It holds space for a conversation to take place. It’s the tension-holder, the supporting architecture for conversation to emerge.
We relate to the world, other people, systems… in all kinds of different ways. How you show up and converse with your family will be different from dearest friends and again different from frenemies and those out for your blood.
How we relate dictates the kinds of conversation possible.
Wine and coffee are highly cultivated and meticulously located and grown to honor and bring to life the particular variety’s expressions. We create structure and engineer for environment to relate in certain ways with the plants. And so the conversations (or, say, the fruit the conversations bear) are brilliant, distinct, and by intentional design.
I imagine that: how you related to that indulgent moment was a kind of sensory delight compared to your usual interaction with your phone or computer — much like the 20-20-20 rule for your eyes.
The 20-20-20 rule for your eyes was something suggested by my optometrist at a time when I played with excel all day long (her name escapes me) :
- Every 20 minutes
- Take 20 seconds to
- Look 20+ feet away
(ideally relaxing your eyes and bringing you into a renewed sense of presence)
Design
All of this is to inform my conviction that:
The interaction design we have with our mobile devices,
Channeling more and more of how we relate to the world through the context of a 2-dimensional screen,
Has net-negative impacts on our well-being through the sensory & expression deprivation we experience
Because:
The interaction design that prioritizes phones/screens as the medium,
Does (by natural fact like in geometry or physics) disqualify most of our senses to be involved in the experience.
How we are related to our phones dictates the types of conversations (and fruit) possible in the interaction.
Emergent Ethos
So… I’ll fast forward through “getting the importance of this for our society” and sum that section up by:
Our life is better with less screen time.
Ask me if you’re hung up on this.
Therefore, the new guiding light for interaction design should be
“Eyes Up & Out of the Box”
What does it look like to interact with everything (like we do on our phone)…
But instead of looking down and shutting off most of our body,
We are engaged with the world and people around us?
This will involve a reframing of the attention-grabbing paradigm… what does it look like when we prioritize the life-affirming quality of interactions over the eye-balls stuck to screens?
There is a kind of joyful liberation of our creative spirit as we prioritize this type of design.
-Gabriel
P.S. As I also discussed in this briefly on TikTok:
Red Cobbler 
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