Abstract

Today’s information technologies may be blamed the most for the speedup of everyday life, information overload, busyness and fragmented attention. In this paper, firstly, how the scholar community perceive the speed-driven environment will be delineated, and then examining how they respond to the problem. Finally, a studio research methodology concerning a more comprehensive sense of the theme of slowness is formed. Modern technologies provide instant accessibility of huge amounts of information, opening up wondrous new possibilities in entertainment, commerce, and education. However, these opportunities are with some cost to the human psyche. It is ridiculous to ignore this cultural wide speedup and its associated manifestations: the stressful sense of information overload as we are drowned by the flood of mass media, e-mail, and the like; the fragmentation of our attention as we are frequently respond to our various information gadgets; and the sense of being constantly overscheduled and over-busy as we try to deal with the heavy demands in both our work and personal lives. The evidence is more than obvious that living like this is eating us away with numerous psychological and medical effects. Forty years ago was the outset of the modern environmental movement when humans came to understand that unchecked industrialization and urbanization would destroy the earth’s ecological balance. Is it not likely that we are heading toward an analogous danger—that unchecked information lavishness and acceleration is destroying our humanity balance? This exploration for understanding the phenomenon and cause, and seeking possible counter-measures may be helpful for forming a fine-tuned theoretical studio methodology. By doing so, a studio strategy can be provided from a diversity of studies and practices, and thus it may promote us to apply the insights to critique the fragmented, speedy, and inattentive mind states that modern technologies seem to encourage.