Case from Bill Gaver and Heather Martin - Alternatives

Many people desire to understand and change their experience of their selves and the world around them. Nonetheless, designs might reflect them in ways that can be meaningful without beng solemn, externalising psychological mechanisms into digital technologies either to escape or encourage them.

From the Case - Worry Stone is basically an eletronic to-do list that uses its processing power to endlessly and visibly rehearse entries. By taking on the fretting of the user, the intention is that it should free time for less neurotic activities. This proposal takes an appropriate use of digital tehnologies to perform tasks that are onerous for humans.

The worry stone would be a device that allows people to externalise their cares so that they need not to dweel on them. Speaking into the device would ofload a task to a small database via speeh convertor. The user would scroll through the list, delete obsolete entries, or print out a 'to do' list.

But the primary function of the Worry Stone would be to take over the user's anxious fretting. To show that the device had truly internalised the user's concerns, its processing power would be dedicated to displaying the list of worries in random order, as quickly as possible. The user could let go of the problem for the moment, knowing that it was safely held in the Worry Stone's memory.

Our Lullaby toy demonstrates such potential - not to offload a user's worries but to stimulate user's emotions and allowing them to externalize their emotions. For instance, the user could display their true emotions in front of the Lullaby toy and the toy would respond accordingly. The user would obtain feed back as to their attitude was too strong or too emotion - then they would be able to readjust their emotions before they encounter another human being. This also helps the user to pertain their anger when they have to enter an important meeting.

Reference
Gaver, B. and Martin, H. 2000. Alternatives - Exploring Information Appliances through Conceptual Design Proposals. Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 209 - 216. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/332040.332433 (Accessed August 03, 2007).