The reflex, and its two endings
You are waiting for a kettle, a bus, a meeting to start. Your hand reaches for your phone before you have decided anything. What happens next has, for most people, two endings. Either the screen lights up with a feed, and eight minutes go somewhere, or you catch yourself, lock it again, and look at a black rectangle.
The advice is always to choose the black screen. It is good advice and people rarely take it, because the reflex is not really about the feed. It is a small, reasonable question: is anything going on with the people I care about? The feed is a terrible answer to that question, and a black screen is no answer at all.
Calm technology
In 1995 Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown of Xerox PARC wrote a short paper called "Designing Calm Technology". Their definition is still the best one: "Calm technology engages both the center and the periphery of our attention, and in fact moves back and forth between the two."
Their examples were physical: a window onto a corridor, a wire that twitched with network traffic. The point was that some information is most useful when you don't have to go and get it. It is there at the edge, readable in a moment, and it only pulls you in when something has changed. Weather is the oldest example there is. Nobody scrolls the sky.
Phones went the other way. Almost everything on them is designed for the centre of attention and for staying there.
What the time is worth
When Allcott and colleagues had a randomly chosen group of Facebook users deactivate their accounts for four weeks in 2018, it freed about an hour a day, and people spent more of it with friends and family. The time was not the only thing that changed: subjective wellbeing rose slightly, and Facebook use stayed lower afterwards.
The social impulse behind the reflex deserves an answer, though, not just a lock screen. The Surgeon General's 2023 advisory on loneliness reported that about one in two American adults said they were lonely. And small contact is worth more than people think: Liu and colleagues found in 2023, across a series of experiments, that people consistently underestimate how much others appreciate being reached out to. Epley and Schroeder found in 2014 that commuters asked to talk to a stranger had a more positive journey than those who sat alone, while people predicted the opposite.
So the useful thing to put in front of the reflex is not more content. It is a quick, true answer to "how are my people?", and a nudge toward the message nobody sends because they underestimate it.
A reading you cannot get anywhere else
That is what weathr is for. Each person in a group says how they are with one tap, one of five weather symbols, and the group is drawn as a sky. Picking up your phone becomes a glance at the weather over your family, your friends or your team. It takes two seconds, and it ends: there is no feed underneath, and the sky stops moving for you until you say how you are again.
It is information no other app has, because it does not exist until the people in a group make it, and it always beats a black screen, because it answers the question the reflex was asking. When it shows rain over somebody, the right next move is not in weathr at all. It is a message.
The calmest version of it is not built yet: an Android home-screen widget, so the reading sits on the phone's own front page and a mood can be cast without opening anything. Today weathr runs in any browser. See what to look at on your phone instead of scrolling.
Sources
- Weiser and Brown (1995). Designing Calm Technology. Xerox PARC.
- Allcott, Braghieri, Eichmeyer and Gentzkow (2020). The Welfare Effects of Social Media. American Economic Review 110(3).
- Office of the US Surgeon General (2023). Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation.
- Liu, Rim, Min and Min (2023). The surprise of reaching out: Appreciated more than we think. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 124(4). doi:10.1037/pspi0000402
- Epley and Schroeder (2014). Mistakenly seeking solitude. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 143(5). doi:10.1037/a0037323