I like your mission statement and the idea of the Mudita Pure. There is definitely place for it on the market and there are many people that would appreciate such device. Sadly I don’t feel that this is for me, but I think that you could expand on your product portfolio to help wider group of people in life simplification. Just to put this into perspective, few words about me… I have been practicing mindfulness for last few 4-5 years, I’m also very tempted to cleanse my life a bit with good dose of minimalism (but it is slow progress so far). Recently I have been also researching subject of ADHD/ADD in adults including spending countless hours on reading stories of people describing their daily lives in the world full of distractions. I’m also a design engineer working with various different type of computer technology every day. And I have spent a lot of time thinking how to combine technology with minimalism and more mindful lifestyle.
One could look at the modern smartphone and say that this is the source of evil, full of distractions, notifications, too easy to get lost in it all. But I think the hardware is not to blame. I think that most apps are not even to blame. The user interface of smartphones is the biggest issue. Does not matter if this is Android or IOS both are designed as connected devices, with no options to change how we interact with it.
And your phone design is an interesting way of resolving that, but it is forcing the user by making the hardware and the software quite basic. And this is not for everyone. If I had to compare this to mindfulness… people are inspired by the monks living in the plum village… how calm and relaxed there are. They are like that because they have simple lives! It is easy to be mindful in such conditions. They have run away from difficult lives of the average human in this civilisation. Being mindful when you have to deal with 9-5 job, with noisy cities, with busy family lives etc… it is completely different level. In a normal life you need to make many conscious choices to have a mindful life. It is not helpful that smartphones (which are almost a must have for many) are in control of us, as we can not customise them to work for us.
I think we have amazing technology available nowadays that could make our lives simpler and calmer. And this is about utilising the latest high-tech to achieve that. In my opinion most of the software and hardware is already there, it is just not integrated properly and not interacting with us in a healthy way. Things like having a map in my pocket (GPS navigation) when I’m lost in the big city is actually calming. What is not calming is a pop-up every few minutes about traffic near-by, about some promotions near by etc. So what about creating/modifying a mobile OS or just user interface overlay that would allow for better control of notifications and distractions, with few apps to automate things and simplify it? Maybe functions of the phone which are the actually most useful could be integrated in most helpful way?
I think that the recent development in digital assistants has a huge potential to help people but if you would review all offerings from Google, Apple, Amazon etc… there is no set of simple apps and devices that would integrate seamlessly, that would work for you. Instead there are free platforms that are designed to harvest data and be very attractive to other companies to promote their products and apps through them.
I remember that some time ago you have been also working on a conventional smartphone… so I guess the aim was to create more devices. So my question is… what is the future… what are you planning?
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