【1996 Archives】

It doesn’t take much to996 Archivesdistracted nowadays: A ping, and you’re asking your friend to repeat what they just said. Google wants to help you with those moments — but can it?

More than a year after launching its first well-being features, Google on Wednesday released six new wellbeing tools in the Play Store. Google says these innovations are part of “a collection of ideas and tools that help people find a better balance with technology.”

These Digital Wellbeing Experiments — as Google calls them — include a live wallpaper that tracks and displays the number of times users unlock their phones each day, a feature that lets users adjust the frequency and time of notifications, and even a … printable paper phone?

But the word “experiments” is key.

The advent of human-machine interaction studies has inspired product designers' attempt to innovate their way out of the social-psychological concerns that come with mobile technology: unwarranted digital distractions, excessive screen time that researchers speculate to cause depression, social media–induced anxiety, and more.

Google’s designers are no exception. The launch of the Google Empathy Lab in 2015 is evidence to the fact that Google’s designers have set out to address those issues.

Danielle Krettek, the lab's principal, in a 2018 speech hinted at Google’s early forays into designing some of the experiments launched on Wednesday.

One of her remarks, in particular, seems to set the premise for Morph, one of Google’s new experiments that allows users to filter out apps depending on their customized time-and-place settings. (Google uses “holiday,” “creativity,” and “work” modes for example.)

“Notifications are super unsexy. What I wanted to do add to that to make it creative and interesting and something that people can get to a juicy, authentic place with.” Krettek said in the 2018 speech. “I want you to think about Airplane mode. Airplane mode is one way — but give me 10 more, for all the modes you are in during your day … It [boiled down] to four [categories]: focused, normal, filtered and amplified.”

And that’s essentially what Morph does — it lets users create "modes" to customize how they want to consume information depending on their needs and mood.

“We’re in a different place now. What it means to design right now is not just about a new wave of technologies, the assistants and the AIs,” Krettek said in her speech. “Right now, the conversation we’re having around AI and design is that this is about deep humanity.”

It’s clear that Google has begun thinking about reinventing human’s relationship with technology through design — and the six new wellbeing tools are evidence to its commitment.

But the question of how design can solve humanity's problems is a complicated one. And at this moment, it’s unclear the extent to which Google’s new tools can help accomplish that.

After all, Google itself says it is still “experimenting.”