Lue Fang

Digital life points to the future but has its problems: A social survey initiated by the International Labour Organization found that digital life is more exhausting than imagined. The main reason is that, when people use digital channels to work or entertaining, it’s too easy for them to switch one task to another while too difficult for them to judge whether they should take a break. It seems that when we entered the postmodern era, we suddenly discovered that we did not know what is the best way to describe the progress of the day. Before the information age, people can estimate whether they can take more workload in the rest of the day through muscle soreness and physical fatigue. But nowadays, the Internet has erased commuting expenses, as well as the public’s keen perception of fatigue, which eventually leads to our overestimation of our mental energy. And this is particularly harmful to heavy internet users today, in the previous interview, many people reported remote work has pushed them into a “never-ending sales mode”.

That's why this project will focus on the "post-epidemic era” context where digital services & entertainment are popular and the labor market is going through a quick digital transformation. My design objective is to provide a solution for mental exhaustion and digital fatigue for those medium-to-heavy internet users. This forward-thinking innovation would be an attempt to find out a new reference system to describe people’s daily routine progress when time and geospatial is no longer applicable, so as to save people from digital fatigue.

Cyberspace Pedometer is an installation that helps people manage their mental energy more wisely when cruising in cyberspace. It forms a symbiotic system with a personal computer and intervenes in the interaction between users and network, helping individuals better perceive willpower consumption and personalize the information, so as to reduce “willpower” expenditure.