The box is made of wood, with a canary-yellow panel on its front hiding the whirring guts of a thermal printer. It’s small enough to hold in your hand. There’s a mid-century elegance to this piece of technology—it doesn’t have the silvery, burnished sleekness of Apple products, with their rounded edges and titanium shells. This is Attention Receipts, an object designed to make your technology usage tangible. The premise is simple: You download a browser plugin; plunk the little box somewhere in your home; and, at the end of the day or at your prompting, the machine spits out a paper receipt. On it is printed the YouTube videos you watched, how long you watched each one, and the sum total of time you spent on the site.

Attention Receipts was created by Anup Sathya, a computer science PhD student and a member of the Actuated Experience Lab (AxLab). Animating the project is his fiery resistance to the attention economy—wherein companies deliberately design their products to be addictive in order to collect greater amounts of their users’ data to sell to advertisers. “A lot of platforms that we use these days are free,” Sathya says, “and they’re free for a reason, because we pay with attention.”

The receipt format is a nod to both the uncomfortable economic implications of online consumption—if it’s free, you’re the product, goes the aphorism—and the importance of tangibility in reframing how we interact with technology. While there are countless apps, browser extensions, and phone settings designed to help combat mindless scrolling, these tools are embedded in the devices themselves, which means the cost of technology usage remains literally immaterial. “I’ve gotten really tired of having another app for everything,” Sathya says. “There is a lot of potential for tangibility to have an impact on digital well-being.”

Tangibility is the characteristic that unites AxLab’s eclectic output. The lab’s focus is on human-computer interaction, or HCI, a field dedicated to finding new ways for people to engage with technology. AxLab’s particular brand of HCI research proposes that this engagement need not be limited to screen-based interfaces like laptops and phones; it can also be facilitated by technology embedded in the objects and surfaces of daily life. “I do really love the things we have around us, like the real world, the real material objects,” AxLab director and computer science assistant professor Ken Nakagaki says. Through technology, “we can reimagine or create a new interactive, embodied, and tangible experience.”

AxLab’s name was inspired by the dual meanings of the word actuate, which can mean to put a machine into action or to move a person to action. The lab’s aim is to make technology that does both. AxLab’s website is filled with examples of these kinds of quirky, experimental creations—a jacket lined with airbags that puff and deflate to make virtual reality games more immersive; small robots that, given a mess of cups and utensils, can set the table for you; kinetic fiber that can stretch, compress, or vibrate in response to stimuli from the human body. “I think these technologies have the power to engage people, make people think, make people take actions, make people be more creative,” Nakagaki says.

In a field study conducted by Sathya and Nakagaki, six participants lived with an Attention Receipts box for three weeks. At the end of the study, a majority of participants reported that the object induced a positive change in their interactions with YouTube, especially regarding the perceived quality of the content they chose to watch. Sathya attributes the success of Attention Receipts to the object’s materiality. In a way, Nakagaki says, Attention Receipts uses human-computer interaction’s own tools against it: “Instead of using tangibility to interact with digital information smoothly, we can use tangibility as a way to resist against it.”

Of course, there is always a risk of people or companies co-opting well-intentioned inventions; Sathya gives the hypothetical example of Attention Receipts being used for workplace surveillance. But when it comes to addictive technology, “the other way is to leave people without any tools to fight it.” When it’s you against developers who are working to make technology as irresistible as possible, self-control only gets you so far.

There’s an irony in the fact that a tool for resisting technology was made in a lab focused on human-computer interaction—a discipline whose vision is, as Sathya puts it, “to embed computation in as many things as possible.” But to Nakagaki, the goal of all of AxLab’s work is to provoke thought about how we do—and don’t—want to interact with technology in our daily lives. The prototypes he and his team build are intended “as a speculative thing that maybe you don’t necessarily want,” Nakagaki says. “What if this thing happened? Do you want it or not? That’s part of the discussion, and that’s part of the intellectual contribution of this research.”

Anyone who has ever been swept away by a current of short-form video content knows that the technology we interact with day to day does not always feel conducive to human flourishing. But this type of mindless digital consumption—the kind that Attention Receipts is designed to counter—is exactly the type in which people are not actuated. In a sense, the project distills AxLab’s work into its essentials: envisioning a world in which tech works with our values, not against them. Sathya knows that using technology to save ourselves from technology might sound paradoxical. But the whirlpool of modern algorithms may be too strong to swim away from unassisted.