Attention Nooks: Situated Frictions to Foster Intentional Technology Use

As persuasive technologies weave themselves deeper into the fabric of domestic life, the challenge of sustaining digital wellbeing grows increasingly entangled with the spaces and rhythms of everyday living. Conventional Digital Self-Control Tools (DSCTs), while offering momentary reprieve, often falter under sustained use, revealing a gap between device-centric interventions and the situated nature of technology habits. In resistance, we present Attention Nooks: a set of spatial interventions that deploy "situated frictions" within the home. Attention Nooks recast digital wellbeing as a lived negotiation of spatial boundaries in the home. Developed through an autobiographical design process, we surface design events that shaped our making and living with our prototypes. We discuss the teleological nature of interventions, implications for ubiquitous computing, and the subversion of ethically ambiguous technologies. Our contribution lies in reframing digital wellbeing as a design opportunity that calls for pluralistic situated encounters in the home.