Slow Tech: Subverting the Attention Economy
by Sydney Nguyen,1 2025 Design & Technology Fellow
Holding our attention hostage. Hijacking our cognitive resources. Conditioning us to be less mindful. We’ve all heard some version of the phrase “you are what you eat.” Today, it feels just as true that we are what we consume with our attention.
At Slow Tech Studio, we create design experiments that explore and soften the side effects of living in an attention economy, particularly the toll that addictive digital products take on mental health. Many of today’s most popular apps are designed with a narrow, short- term objective: to influence human behavior in ways that maximize engagement, often at the expense of well-being.
This isn’t a failure of individual discipline. It’s a systems problem. What is the Attention Economy?
We know that too much social media can leave us feeling anxious, depleted, and disconnected. Yet most advice still focuses on individual restraint: spend less time scrolling, set better boundaries, practice more willpower.
This framing misplaces responsibility. As daily technology users, we’re exposed to design patterns that manufacture urgency—like notifications, badge counts, auto- play, and swipe-to-refresh—in most of our digital utilities for communication, shopping, planning, and productivity. They are carefully engineered to keep us engaged, responsive, and slightly on edge. When technologies are designed to be habit-forming, overuse is not a personal failure, it’s expected.
What is Slow Tech?
To understand slow technology, it helps to look at other “slow” movements that emerged in response to industrial speed and scale.
- Slow food asks us to understand and respect where our food comes from and the ecosystems that produce it.
- Slow fashion invites us to examine supply chains, labor conditions, and the full life cycle of our clothes.
- Slow travel encourages deeper awareness of the economic, environmental, and social impact of tourism.
- Slow anything begins with the same shift: thinking carefully about what we actually need, rather than defaulting to what is fastest or most convenient.
Slow Tech applies this mindset to our relationship with digital tools likemobile devices, social media, email, and other technologies that increasingly shape how we think, feel, and relate to one another. We work through art and design because art doesn’t rush to resolve tension. It asks better questions than it answers. And good art rewards you for slowing down and paying closer attention.
Our Guiding Principles
Be idealistic. We deserve better from the tools we use. If we suspend assumptions about what technology must be, we can imagine systems that nourish the mind instead of exhausting it. Subvert the attention economy. Attention is a finite and precious resource. Technologies that respect time and cognitive capacity return agency to users rather than extracting it from them. Prioritize personal growth. The most meaningful measure of success is not how long a product keeps you engaged but how it supports reflection, learning, and growth.
The Function
If attention loss is not a personal failure, then responsibility shifts to design.
At their core, technologies are tools created by humans to make life better in some way. Function describes what a technology does. But technologies also have form: how they look, feel, and are structured. Materials, aesthetics, and interfaces shape not only how we use tools but also how those tools shape us.
Science fiction author Ursula Le Guin once described technology as “the active human interface with the material world.”2 She challenged the idea that only advanced or spectacular machines deserve to be called technology, arguing that we overlook the quieter tools that structure everyday life.
A wooden spoon, a woven basket, or a stone knife are all technologies. So is writing something down to extend the limits of memory. Wearing glasses to sharpen vision. Taking a photograph to share a moment with someone who wasn’t there. Live streaming to reach millions at once. Our tools are not us, but they are extensions of us.
The Form
The word interface makes this relationship visible. Its roots come from Latin: inter, meaning “between,” and facies, meaning “face” or “surface.” An interface is the boundary where two systems meet. It is where conversations happen.
In human–computer interaction, this boundary is our daily work. Every interface asks an implicit question: what does a good conversation between a human and a system look like? Don Norman, who is notably the first person ever to have "user experience" in a job title (at Apple in 1993), wrote that emotional design has 3 pillars: visceral, behavioural, and reflective.3 Together, form and function create the full experience of any technology and strongly influence how we feel about it.
About Us
Slow Tech Studio is a learning project for us as much as it is a public one. It is a space to deepen our understanding as designers and as everyday technology users. By examining familiar design patterns alongside their emotional and behavioral outcomes, we return to a simple but powerful question:
Why am I paying attention, and how am I being rewarded?
With that, we thank you for your attention. QR code to learn more about us:
Sydney Nguyen was a 2025 FASPE Design & Technology Fellow. She is pursuing a master's in Design Engineering at Harvard University. She also mentors emerging technologists as the vice president of the board of advisors at BridgeGood.
Notes
- Brittany Roberts also contributed to this piece and to Slow Tech more broadly.
- https://www.ursulakleguin.com/a-rant-about-technology.
- Norman, Donald A. Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things. Basic Books, New York, 2004, p. 63.