What's "Olly"?
Olly is a domestic music player that slowly re-surfaces songs from a person's digital listening history. It features a rotating wooden disc that subtly indicates a song is available. The speed of rotation corresponds to the age of the song—the slower the rotation, the older the track. To listen, the user must physically spin the disc, creating a tangible connection to their past.
Olly slowly surfaces songs from your past, inviting interaction and contemplation in ways that scale and change over time.
Who's it for?
Researchers, design practitioners, philosophy of technology, people interested in music and their personal digital histories.
Approach
The project uses a Research through Design approach, framed by the concept of 'Slow Technology'. The team created Olly as a 'research product'—a finished object rather than a prototype—designed to endure over time. It is in contrast to utilitarian qualities of many everyday devices to give rise to more open-ended experiences of reflection, reminiscence, and enjoyment.
This allowed for a 15-month field study where three Olly devices were placed in separate households, enabling the team to understand the long-term experience of living with a slow, reflective technology and re-experiencing moments in their histories as songs from their pasts slowly, yet indefinitely resurfaced.
Contribution
Olly provides a rare, concrete example of how 'slowness' can be a valuable design quality for creating meaningful, long-term relationships with our personal data. It challenges the dominant design paradigm of attention-seeking, always-on devices by demonstrating an alternative path for technology that supports reflection and gracefully integrates into everyday life.
Why is it in the Observatory?
Olly is an outstanding example of Design Research that questions mainstream technology norms while offering a tangible alternative. By embodying slowness in a beautifully resolved domestic device, it shows how technology can support longer-term, reflective relationships with personal data.