Susan said that she gets sad when she goes to a playground and sees parents sucked into their phones oblivious to their playing children.

She wondered if absorption in a phone is different from absorption in knitting or absorption in a novel. To her it seemed worse.

I agree.

Absorption in knitting is not total. Maybe another word than “absorption” would serve better — maybe occupation. Knitting occupies our hands, leaving us ambiently aware of our environment. We are still here, despite being focused on an activity.

Reading, ideally, is total absorption. A good book transports us elsewhere, to a fictional reality that holds our attention.

What makes phones different is that they transport us away from where we are, but not to another place, or at least not for long. Our attention is taken out of where we are, away from who we are with, and shattered and scattered. Five second blips of exposure to here and there, this image, that image, this feeling and that. Our attention disintegrates into disconnected stimuli. Our spirit is an atomized cloud of impressions and twitches dispersing into nowhere, whenever, no-one.

And this is what makes the playground phone use feel tragic. A parent reading a book seems like they’re enjoying a moment of their own. It is escapism to somewhere, but it leaves the child space for free play. A parent on a phone is just escaping from presence where their child is. They could be anywhere and do this, and it is likely their habit to do it wherever they are.

This got me thinking. If there is a focused elsewhere and a focused here, and there is also a scattered elsewhere, is there a scattered here? It would be attention scattered across an environment. It might be because the environment is overstimulating and chaotic (like an amusement park or festival), or it might be a distractible state of mind — or both at once.

Not to pull a stock consultant move, but I had to map it to a 2×2.

I realize I actually missed the subtle crux of what Susan said.

The thrust of it was more personal and less an opinion on parenting.

When Susan sees another parent (or grandparent) absorbed in their phone at the playground, Susan herself feels isolated from them. Why would she feel that way?

It makes perfect sense to me. Here I wax designerly, and reflect on our human need to share the world.

When parents gather at a playground with our children, we have important things in common. We are doing the same kind of activity, in the same place, with the same equipment. We have spaces and objects mediating experiences that matter to us. We also play a parenting role, and we probably share many joys, fears, hopes, concerns and other experiences all parents know. These things potentially connect us.

Humans need this connection to each other via the places and things of the world, and connections to the world via relationships with others. One core job of designers is to materially mediate these relationships.

As happens so often, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities comes to mind:

In Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city’s life, the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses, white or black or gray or black-and-white according to whether they mark a relationship of blood, of trade, or authority, agency. When the strings become so numerous that you can no longer pass among them, the inhabitants leave: the houses are dismantled; only the strings and their supports remain. From a mountainside, camping with their household goods, Ersilia’s refugees look at the labyrinth of taut strings and poles that rise in the plain. That is the city of Ersilia still, and they are nothing.

They rebuild Ersilia elsewhere. They weave a similar pattern of strings which they would like to be more complex and at the same time more regular than the other. Then they abandon it and take themselves and their houses still farther away.

Thus, when travelling in the territory of Ersilia, you come upon the ruins of the abandoned cities, without the walls which do not last, without the bones of the dead which the wind rolls away: spiderwebs of intricate relationships seeking a form.