slog had established a grueling work pace as the new normal.

For years, I had been vowing to
get my workload under control,
and for years it had remained
incessantly not. The situation
at home was little different,
and what I actually did was clear.
I hoped Change Islands would be a
place where I could shift from over-
load and overwork to contemplation
and reflection. It turned out to be
a place where my understanding
of myself and my work underwent
massive revision.

goods is available. For example, fresh vegetables are generally limited to the Newfoundland root-vegetable staples: carrots, potatoes, rutabagas, onions, parsnips, and cabbage. Internet shopping is possible but is accompanied by prohibitive shipping costs.

chores and tasks that I had set myself, with not enough time to accomplish them before another grueling workweek began.

This situation was not only unpleasant but also ironic. After all, my career to date had been built around the ideas that contemporary consumer society places too much emphasis on efficiency and productivity, and that we needed to take other values into account in technology design. A major focus of my work was technologies that opened up space for nonwork activities, including socializing and contemplation: precisely the things my lifestyle left little time for. The contradiction between what I designed for

Choices

The first noticeable perceptual
shift that happened quite quickly
on my arrival was that the world
of opportunities in goods and ser-
vices available to me narrowed
considerably. Change Islands is
an isolated, remote community.
Given the ferry schedule, trips
to the doctor, bank, or pharmacy
on neighboring Fogo Island take
about six hours, while visits for a
wider range of goods and services
to a larger town on the mainland
generally take a full day. In the
four small shops on the islands,
none of which is much larger
than an average American living
room, a fairly small selection of
At first I experienced these limi-
tations as a real problem, but over
time I became used to living with
the available selection. I would
sometimes buy exotic vegetables
such as tomatoes, peppers, or avo-
cados in a larger town, then find
them languishing weeks later in
the refrigerator because I didn’t
actually need them—what I had
on the island was enough. After
a while and somewhat to my sur-
prise, I began to experience these
constraints as benefits. In Ithaca,
I would spend time driving from
store to store or surfing the Internet
to acquire the things that I believed
I needed; on Change Islands, the
thought that I could use something

March + April 2011