Brendan Dawes' 'Six Monkeys' Inventions Bring Physical Off Switches To The Digital World

There's Now A Literal Off-Switch For Email

Sometimes the modern world can get a little overwhelming. Even if you build up the will-power to ignore your email for a few hours, you still know it's waiting there, slowly accumulating, just one smartphone screen press away.

So what if you could turn it off from a switch in the wall?

That's the idea behind one of Brendan Dawes 'Six Monkeys' devices, which aim to bring the physical world back to communication and computing.

The concept device ('Nim') has a simple two-way switch - if email is switched to on, you receive them as normal. If it's off, you don't. It's an extreme (and perhaps tongue-in-cheek) solution, but it's also a real problem, so it's interesting to think about new ways to cope.

Dawes said:

"Why can't we turn email off and on as easy as other appliances in our house? Nim places such a switch for your email next to a regular light switch so when you feel like switching off for the weekend, just flick the switch and email will be prevented from coming through the network across all your devices. By changing the context of how we turn email off and on we might better manage our relationship to it, easily able to switch off whenever we feel like it."

Take a look how it works, below - and check out his other ideas at his website.

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