The Analogue Skills Project (@AnalogueSkills) is my exploration of doing things less digitally. My aim is to discover/redicover ways of being, feeling and acting that might serve us better.
In less than a generation digital technology has transformed the way we think, feel and behave. As we become ever more dependent on our digital devices and online connectivity, what once served has become a means to manipulate us. From user to used.
With dependency comes fear. How could I ever live without it? But so ubiquitous is our internet-enabled world that we risk forgetting the ways we could live and flourish without computers in our pockets.
The study of Analogue Skills is a playful invitation to go back a few steps on our journey of tech development to discover – or rediscover – the capabilities of our in-built human operating system: to sense, discover, navigate, reflect, relate to and love one another.
The Analogue Skills Project is my attempt to record less-digital ways of doing things before they get forgotten so that we can use these to evaluate what technology we do and don’t want. It is an attempt to build resilience and reduce dependence on technology that may not always be there to help us. It is my hope to find a more human balance between the analogue and the digital.
Over the coming weeks and months I am going to be writing a series of posts on specific analogue skills as well as reflections on the engineering, creative and practical philosophical implications of analogue versus digital.
If you have suggestions for analogue skills that I should include in this collection, then please add them to the collection below.
The Analogue Skills Manifesto
- Don’t delegate autonomy to the machines
- Resist a mediated experience
- Resist life as content
- Re-discover old tech
- Much less is much more
- Welcome uncertainty
- Don’t get things done
- Share, swap and learn from others
- Relish company
- Seek nourishment in time alone
- Embrace friction, embrace inconvenience
- Forget the unimportant and remember the valuable
- Ground yourself and find your bearings
- Use your hands and your senses
- Concentrate
- You have everything you need
Most posts on Analogue Skills
- Women and men’s Tour de France
- Too many emails – the Eiffel Over guide
- Storm’s coming: go to the cinema
- Updates from a regenerative system
- Analogue Skills for Design at the University of Bath
- What happened when I tried to use an old iPod
- Analogue Challenge 001: look for the time
- Analogue Skill 009: Sketch what you see
- Analogue Skill 008: Be happy not knowing
- Analogue Skill 007: Print out photos of your friends
- Analogue Skill 006: Sing songs with other people
- Analogue Skill 005: Finding North
- Analogue Skill 004: Become a regular
- What if the screen you are now using is your last?
- Six motivations for collecting Analogue Skills
- Analogue Skill 003: Watch the clouds – streaming now
- What is real-world search in a digital world?
- Analogue Skill 002: Remember some phone numbers
- More lanes = more cars. More apps = more things to do?
- Analogue Skill 001: Buy tickets at the station
- Connection with nature through drawing
- Farewell Beethoven
- Creative inspiration from December
- Creating contours in the flat landscape of lockdown
- Proust, constructivism and listening to clients
- Asking someone instead of Googling
- New adventures with a television – part 1.
- Too many inputs
- Proust’s antidote to endless scrolling
- The left-right game – experiments in navigation, embodiment and control
- Apollo 8 | What do you do with your computer?
- Imprisoned with the infinite – the philosophical implications of an imaginary visit to Sweden
- The horizon of existence | surveillance capitalism | the return of analogue skills
- The satisfaction of learning what the buttons can do
- From self-help to help me.
- The experience of distance
- Derive #2 City of London – Log book
- Circling the square – psychogeography in the City
- Augmented reality stargazing: unintended consequences
- Analogue skills: fogotten powers
- Use these 5 apps to create distraction-free time.
All posts categorised and tagged as analogue skills.