Pain, Posters and Philosophy

Aristotle said that “the aim of the wise is not to secure pleasure, but to avoid pain” – and while I’m not certain that he’d heard of the Hills Are Evil project at this point in his career, he certainly summed up our philosophy! As such, we have moved on from thoughts of ski runs and contours, and have been thinking of ways of expressing pain in a fun way – so if a user were to propose a route up the infamous Park Street, then the app would say ‘That will kill you!’ or similar. This has been quite amusing as it has revealed untold levels of clumsiness and misfortune within the team – from standing barefoot on sticklebricks to hitting thumbs with hammers, between us we seem to have survived some pretty traumatic experiences. If you’re in the mood to share your own personal measures of pain (let’s try and keep this light-hearted) please do pop a comment on this post.

With these phrases of pain, we will be constructing a pain scale to make levels of steepness more meaningful to users, as the raw numbers of distance, ascent and descent are not conducive to the best user experience. In time this pain scale will enable users to set their threshold and be routed accordingly.

The mobile app is now coming together too. With an appearance not dissimilar to a Western WANTED poster, there’s a definite feel that hills, cobbles and steps need to be held to account. We’ve gone for an angle which avoids being explicitly ‘disabled’ as we felt it could discourage those pushing buggies, skateboarders and the chronically lazy from engaging with the tool.

Anyhow, that’s all for now as we’ve got a list of painful experiences to go over with our therapists. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to deal with your past traumas too – although if you don’t feel ready to share with the group then we will happily accept entries/suggestions/sob stories at hillsareevil@overlaymedia.com. Thanks!