The Joy Of Light Switches, Wandering And Train Stations To Nowhere

For a few years now people have behaved like “zombie pedestrians” with their heads buried in their phones as they walked. The zombie effect might be getting worse, thanks to Google's new “experimental walking directions” which use augmented reality to help you find your way.

Yet while innovations like this add predictability to our world, there are growing examples that people want more experiences they can touch, places they can discover and time to aimlessly wander.

In Southern Norway, for example, a new underwater restaurant and research center promises an experience that “challenges what determines a person’s physical placement in their environment.” A similarly disruptive experience can be earned on a Japanese train platform to nowhere which has no entrances or exits. The only way to experience it is to disembark a train there, and wait for the next one to pick you up.

Each are examples of unique real-world experiences that bring us out of our reliance on technology and back into the physical world, a Non-Obvious trend from last year's report that we named Touchworthy. Recently designer and urbanist Dan Hill shared a similar sentiment in an article defending the humble light switch:

“If we always replace touch with voice activation, or simply by our presence entering a room, we are barely thinking or understanding, placing things out of mind. ... As is often the case with unthinking smart systems, it is a highly individualising interface, revealing no trace of others.”

It is this “individualized interface,” as Hill calls it, which might explain not only why we seem to gravitate toward guilty pleasures like violent shows on Netflix, but also why human contact might become a luxury good and we might increasingly prefer a sort of “Human Mode” instead. The truth is, technology has never been very good at understanding that sometimes we humans might not want the shortest distance between two paths. Sometimes, we might just prefer getting lost.