What's "Olly"?
Olly is a domestic music player that re-surfaces songs from a person's digital listening history by connecting to their Spotify account. It features a rotating wooden disc that slowly rotates when Olly has a track available to play. The speed that the disc rotates is related to how long ago the track was last listened to, the further back in time the track was last played, the slower the disc rotates. If the user wants to listen to the track they indicate this to Olly by physically spinning the disc, creating a tangible connection to their listening past.
Olly slowly surfaces songs from your past and uses a novel interaction to encourage contemplation.
Who's it for?
The project is aimed at technology designers, researchers, and those interested in personal digital histories. For designers and researchers, Olly is a demonstration of how slowness can be used as inspiration for gratifying interactions that don't just allow us to achieve a task like listening to music, but actually make us think at the same time. For those interested in personal digital histories the device shows how carefully considered and engineered interactions can be harnessed to allow our historical data to become part of our present.
Approach
Olly is partly a Research through Design project—it was through the process of designing it that new understanding and knowledge was created. In this case the concept of Slow Technology was a key guiding principle.
Olly is also described as a research product. Unlike some other types of prototype, research products are intended to be used over a long period of time, in this case over a 15-month field study. During that study Olly was placed in separate households enabling the researchers to understand the long-term experience of living with a slow, reflective technology that allows moments from the past to resurface.
Bringing all this together, Olly is an example of Research through Design project that produced a research product, this was studied in a 15-month field study, and the whole project is exploring and inspired by slow technology.
Contribution
The design of Olly device itself provides a rare concrete example of how the idea of slow technology can be a valuable design quality. Through the extended field study the device demonstrated how this kind of design can allow for open-ended experiences of reflection, reminiscence and enjoyment, qualities that are in contrast to technology designs that are always on and attempting to grab users' attention. The project shows how embracing ideas like slow technology can help support more meaningful long-term relationships with our personal data, and gracefully integrate these into everyday life.
Why is it in the Observatory?
Olly is an outstanding example of how relatively abstract ideas, such as slow technology can be used to inspire novel designs that question mainstream technology norms, and show the benefits of the alternatives. Moreover, Olly showcases how and why to create research products rather than simply prototypes. Research products allow us to learn from in real use over extended periods of time.