DO YOU pay enough attention to your gadgets and possessions 鈥� even when they are no longer new and shiny?
at Indiana University in Bloomington is designing ways for objects to periodically make their presence felt, forcing us to 鈥渞eflect鈥� on them more often. He believes that this will increase our sense of attachment to our possessions, helping to end our unsustainable habit of constantly buying new things and dumping the old.
For instance, he has designed a table with an embedded digital counter that displays the number of heavy objects that have been placed on it during its lifetime. The counter becomes blurry or erratic if someone drops a heavy object on the table, only later returning to the correct count.
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Another approach is cheeky misbehaviour, such as a lamp that dims if you leave it on for too long; shaking the lamp 鈥渨akes鈥� it again. Or a clock that occasionally shows the wrong time, only to correct itself and display a message that it was just joking.
Such attention-seeking objects will 鈥渄iscourage thoughtless consumption of things鈥�, Pierce claims. He presented his ideas last week at the conference in Boston.
