tracing_digits

By Edoardo Guido

Internet users scroll approximately 90 meters per day, but not many of them are conscious of what this actually means. We see it as the way of walking the digital self; machines see it a binary sequence. This project makes users conscious of the trace they leave by moving through digital content.

Featured image of the project tracing_digits

Metaphor used:

This is merely an attempt at tackling something volatile by freezing the gesture on a tangible object like paper. A website invites the user to scroll down the page, showing nothing but the trace generated by the gesture and the total scrolled distance. With the click of a button, the trace is then converted to an image and impressed on paper by a thermal printer, which also compares the total scrolled length to the average scrolled length by users each day.

Intended Meaning:

This infopoetry has to make people aware of an action that they unconsciously repeat many times per day, and that it has now become not only a convention but our new pair of legs, a new way of moving around. The first reaction a normal user could have is to start considering the act of scrolling as a way of covering a real-life distance, always being used to motion gestures on digital devices to cover virtual-life distances (e.g. scrolling the news/Instagram/Facebook feed). After this first acknowledgment, the next step could be that the traveled distance is more than one could expect with just a few scrolls. After some moments of swiping down the page, the user may perceive that his action has led him farther away than what he would expect. The possibility of going back to the website and resuming from the last reached point lets the users go on with their path and explore how far they can go.

Source:

https://twitter.com/RaymondWoodward/status/989987565523611648