Calm Technology

"We have struggled for some time to understand the design if calm technology, and our thoughts are still incomplete and perhaps even a bit confused. Nonetheless, we believe that calm technology may be the most important design problem of the twenty-first century, and it is time to begin the dialogue."

As mentioned in a previous blog post, the article "Calm Technology" by Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown has been further investigated.

The paper describes the problems of today's information overload and how calm technologies could solve these problem, introducing a new way of presenting digital information to people. It is distinguished between a person's center of attention and periphery of attention, meaning "what we are attuned to without attending to explicitly." As an example, a car driver is described, and how he might not pay his entire attention on the car engine's noise constantly, but still be able to quickly recognize and maybe take immediate action once the sound changes. The ability to "move easily from the periphery of our attention, to the center, and back" is pointed out as a major attribute and advantage of calm technologies.

The attributes and abilities described to calm technologies in this paper are in line with the design vision for the "Listening to the Heart of Business" project. The information presentation is supposed to stay ambient and perceived only in a subtle way by the "periphery of our attention", but still be able to quickly catch our full attention when necessary. A related metric to this could be the so called notification level, often being described as a typical dimension of an ambient display taxonomy.

"It seems contra-dictionary to say, in the face of frequent complaints about information overload, that more information could be encalming. It seems almost nonsensical to say that the way to become attuned to more information is to attend to it less."

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"As we learn to design calm technology, we will enrich not only our space of artifacts  but also our opportunities for being with other people. Thus may design of calm technology come to play a central role in a more humanly empowered twenty-first century."