“A poor life this if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.”

 

The concluding line from the poem ‘Leisure’ - by William Henry Davies,  fits perfectly in the current scenario. The context being that, with ever increasing work, we barely have time to actually reflect upon the task we are doing since our attention is so divided and mind distracted.

 

In a hyper-connected world, the need to feel and stay connected in order to not miss out on anything often shadows the importance of taking time out. The quality of life and work suffers because one can’t focus and fully concentrate on one task. The digital devices are cleverly designed to use human behaviour and create addictive habits. These challenges are recent and create havoc when taken into account their far reaching effect on quality of life, work satisfaction and fulfilment. Words like digital detox have become popular for a reason. The project discusses various methods and presents research that went into creating experiences for solitude and focused work. It also discusses how to engage and disengage the mind by using designing for senses in conjunction with physical spaces.

The core idea is — how to get stuff done when you’ve got so much stuff to do that you can’t seem to focus on a single task!

One notable aspect is while we use many collaboration tools we understand that this is not sufficient and we need to create processes and environments for people to get in flow. This line of thinking led to embark on a project: creating solitude in a hyper connected world that culminated in creating a Pomodoro Pod. This physical space mimics the Pomodoro technique to create high concentration on a task. Pomodoro is a time management method which uses a timer to break down work into intervals, traditionally 25 minutes in length, separated by short breaks.