Calm Technology

Preface

I FIRST CAME ACROSS Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown’s work “Designing Calm Technology” in 2005. I was a sophomore in college at the time, and although technology was a passion of mine, my coursework and research were primarily in anthropology—I didn’t yet know how tightly linked the two disciplines actually were. I was just beginning to discover how important an understanding of human behavior was to the design of technology, and specifically, the ways we communicate with our devices.

In 2005, smartphones were just entering the landscape, transforming the humble mobile phone from a glorified walkie-talkie into a fully functioning computer that would take all of the challenges of computer user interfaces and amplify them in our daily lives. It was this research that led me to eventually write my thesis on smartphones and their impact on human culture. During my research I stumbled upon a little-known but breakthrough paper in human–computer interaction from the mid-’90s called “Designing Calm Technology.” It turned out that researchers at Xerox PARC, including technologists and anthropologists from a variety of backgrounds, had been working for years on understanding the impact of technology on people’s behavior and well-being.

Their chief concern was how to best design technologies for a future saturated with small devices. I realized that the subject of Calm Technology and the research underlying it were not just about where the Internet was headed, but where our entire society was headed. The topic was worth a lot more attention that it had originally received.

Figure P-1. Xerox PARC Computer Science Laboratory (CSL), circa 1980s, where early Internet pioneer and Lab Director Bob Taylor held informal meetings with laboratory students in beanbag chairs.^[1]

Weiser and Brown were at least a decade ahead of their time. They were so far ahead that their work is in danger of being forgotten...precisely at the time we most need it. Weiser was the intellectual father of Ubiquitous Computing. He and Brown first introduced the concept of “Calm Technology” in their 1995 paper, published at Xerox PARC. This is still the term most commonly used to describe it, though it might be more accurate to call it “Calm Interaction,” or simply “Calm Design.”

We need their conceptual framework, their advice, and their research now more than ever, or we will increasingly run into issues like loss of human agency, security, and privacy, not to mention a crisis of bandwidth. None of us wants a future where we continuously update settings for apps we never use, nor do we want to always be on pause while waiting for a bit of technology to fix itself. Weiser said that we wouldn’t be able to interact with future technology the same way that we interact with a desktop computer. That future is now.

In 2005 we were just beginning to see the promise of mobile devices, but back in the ’80s and ’90s, Weiser and Brown envisioned a future full of devices much like our current televisions, smartphones, and tablets: a series of what they called “pads, tabs, and boards.” As time progressed, I realized just how core their insights would be in a world increasingly mediated by technology.

My study of cell phones, social cues, and interface design quickly grew into a career in user experience (UX) and interaction design. I eventually realized that most technology gets in the way of people’s lives instead of working with them. We’re stuck with heavy applications struggling to work on connected smartphones with minimal battery life. How will a coming era of small devices solve this problem? We’re poised to become even more anxious and overwhelmed, with everything beeping at us.

The next decade will nurture a new generation of new connected devices fraught with frustration and complexity. Many people speak of an exciting new future of devices, but we haven’t solved the problems in technology we have right now. The promise of the Internet of Things (IoT) is a fallacy if it is unconnected to helping people solve problems. It’s not just a fun thing you can run in your house—it must provide a use. Successful technology for the Internet of Things era will have to become very simple, with minimal interfaces. It is my belief that the future of the Internet of Things will be driven by “Calm Technology”: elegant, humane, and unobtrusive.

This book offers some principles for developing the next generation of devices. We need new tools and a new vision to make the Internet of Things work for us, not against us. Surprisingly, that vision comes to us from a team that envisaged the future decades ago. I wrote Calm Technology to bring their concepts to light in the current era, so we might learn from them and not unnecessarily repeat their intellectual labor.

I will also expand on Weiser and Brown’s ideas by reflecting on what is currently happening in the industry. The advantage of our historical perspective is that we can make observations about how technology actually developed in order to test-drive the ideas put forward by these thinkers. Smartphones, modern Internet access, and cheap sensors were only theories in their time, but they still built prototypes of what a future world would look like with them.

We can learn a lot from the conceptual framework of these thinkers by studying how they approached a future world decades before it came to be. In a sense, they were not blinded by what was, so they were able to clearly imagine what could be. They were able to think about the long-term effects of technology in an environment outside of time.

The idea of an unobtrusive technology is not new. It was a century ago that people were thinking about how to harness and create something that would become the first Calm Technology: electricity. Electricity is all around us. It works in the background without actively requiring our attention.

An ideal app or technology is one that becomes invisible in its functioning. It provides us a utility that we need without drawing excessive attention to itself. Unlike electricity, much of our current technology breaks without warning, or interrupts us with status or software updates, taking us out of our flow and away from our goals. It stands against us and outside of us.

Though we might think of technology as cold and inhuman, it’s important to remember that technology—for all its exotic idiosyncrasies—is fundamentally human. We designed it as an extension of ourselves. It is time that we smooth that relationship for the next generation.

Who Should Read This Book

You should read this book if you actively use, design, or make decisions about technology. It is especially relevant if you happen to be a user experience designer, product manager, engineer, or executive. You should definitely read this book if you’re bothered by poorly designed information systems and want to make them better.

This book is a look at designing for the next 50 billion devices. It asks several questions that aren’t asked often enough yet, but will soon be on everyone’s mind: How can we create technologies that will only demand our attention when absolutely necessary? How do we design for privacy, bandwidth constraints, and battery life? How can we enter products smoothly into the market and give them intelligent design for all stages of their lifecycle? And finally, how can we design technology that people love? Technology that becomes a part of life, and not a distraction from it? Can we design tech for generations, not just seasons?

We will soon, we are told, have fridges that tell us when to go to the store to pick up eggs, and “smart” stickers that tell us that the bananas we bought last week aren’t doing so well. But I don’t need a computer to tell me that some of the food in my fridge doesn’t look so good anymore, and neither do you: a banana is a beautifully evolved piece of natural technology that visually indicates if it’s past its best. I see value in receiving an alert that I am out of milk while I am at the store, but not if it depends on technology that has been funded by investors to only work well only in optimal conditions, or on a device that requires my continual attention to keep it working effectively.

Things that break add friction to our lives; they get in the way of getting something done. We talk about “smart watches” that bug you about all of the things that are going on in your life—text messages, status updates, and emails right on your wrist.

But this kind of technology takes you out of your life. It interrupts you, often with information you don’t need, because it is delivered by default.

We see systemic friction all the time: each time we upgrade a phone to a new operating system, or rent a place to live and inherit different kitchen appliances with strange new buttons. Low-friction systems, on the other hand, are those that bring us data and increased capacity in a non-annoying way. We need to make technologies that can amplify humanness and retain human choice.

Thank you for reading this book! I hope it will help give you a framework for thinking about the future of connected devices and how you might build or modify existing devices.

If you’d like to learn more or contribute to the community, visit http://calmtech.com and @calmtechbook or @caseorganic on Twitter. There is also a video workshop on Calm Technology (http://bit.ly/calm-tech-video) available on the O’Reilly website. In addition, the latest exercises in Calm Technology will be available at http://calmtech.com/exercises. If you’d like to contact me, please email [e-mail].

How This Book Is Organized

This book is organized into six chapters:

Chapter 1: Designing for the Next 50 Billion Devices

This chapter examines the rapid growth of devices from the 1950s to the current era of Ubiquitous Computing. What do 50 billion devices mean for human attention, bandwidth, and battery life? What risks does a social network of devices have for human agency, and how can we solve these problems with Calm Design?

Chapter 2: Principles of Calm Technology

This chapter outlines a number of guidelines for designing Calm Technology. We’ll cover concepts such as the limited bandwidth of attention, compressing information into our peripheral senses, and designing technology to consume the smallest amount of our mental attention. The chapter outlines the following principles:

• Technology should require the smallest possible amount of attention.

• Technology should inform and create calm.

• Technology should make use of the periphery.

• Technology should amplify the best of technology and the best of humanity.

• Technology can communicate, but doesn’t need to speak.

• Technology should work even when it fails.

• The right amount of technology is the minimum needed to solve the problem.

• Technology should respect social norms.

Chapter 3: Calm Communication Patterns

Here we’ll look at examples of Calm Technology grouped by how each device captures our attention. This chapter discusses simple status indicators such as lights and sounds, then goes on to examine more complex, system-based patterns such as persuasive loops and contextual notifications. These are some of the topics we’ll discuss:

• Visual status indicators

• Status tones

• Haptic alerts

• Status shouts

• Ambient awareness

• Contextual notifications

• Persuasive technology

Chapter 4: Exercises in Calm Technology

This chapter gives you the opportunity to apply what you’ve learned in a series of exercises involving the design of common human objects.

Here’s a full list of the exercises we will look at:

• Exercise 1: A Calmer Alarm Clock

• Exercise 2: A Clock That Starts the Day

• Exercise 3: A Year-Long Battery

• Exercise 4: A Calmer Kitchen

• Exercise 5: A Fridge for Healthier Eating

• Exercise 6: Using Ambient Awareness

• Exercise 7: Bringing Haptics into Play

Chapter 5: Calm Technology in Your Organization

This chapter discusses how you can integrate concepts of Calm Technology within an organization, including considerations of privacy and security. We’ll cover strategies for avoiding failed launches, how to form and test teams, and how to successfully transition products into everyday life.

Chapter 6: The History and Future of Calm Technology

This final chapter more closely examines the origins of Calm Technology and Ubiquitous Computing at Xerox PARC. We’ll cover some of the philosophy of the researchers at Xerox PARC and how their early work contributed to their worldview.

Safari^® Books Online

Safari Books Online (http://www.safaribooksonline.com) is an on-demand digital library that delivers expert content in both book and video form from the world’s leading authors in technology and business. Technology professionals, software developers, web designers, and business and creative professionals use Safari Books Online as their primary resource for research, problem solving, learning, and certification training.

Safari Books Online offers a range of product mixes and pricing programs for organizations, government agencies, and individuals. Subscribers have access to thousands of books, training videos, and prepublication manuscripts in one fully searchable database from publishers like O’Reilly Media, Prentice Hall Professional, Addison-Wesley Professional, Microsoft Press, Sams, Que, Peachpit Press, Focal Press, Cisco Press, John Wiley & Sons, Syngress, Morgan Kaufmann, IBM Redbooks, Packt, Adobe Press, FT Press, Apress, Manning, New Riders, McGraw-Hill, Jones & Bartlett, Course Technology, and dozens more. For more information about Safari Books Online, please visit us online.

How to Contact Us

Please address comments and questions concerning this book to the publisher:

O’Reilly Media, Inc.
1005 Gravenstein Highway North
Sebastopol, CA 95472
800-998-9938 (in the United States or Canada)
707-829-0515 (international or local)
707-829-0104 (fax)

We have a web page for this book, where we list errata, examples, and any additional information. You can access this page at http://bit.ly/calm-technology.

To comment or ask technical questions about this book, send email to [e-mail].

For more information about our books, courses, conferences, and news, see our website at http://www.oreilly.com.

Find us on Facebook: http://facebook.com/oreilly

Follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/oreillymedia

Watch us on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/oreillymedia

Acknowledgments

To Mark Weiser, Rich Gold, and John Seely Brown for their work at Xerox PARC and the inspiration for this book.

To my primary content editors, Carl Alviani and Kellyn Bardeen, for long days and nights of in-depth help, and to the fantastic and very patient Angela Rufino, Mary Treseler, and Jasmine Kwityn, my editors at O’Reilly.

To Scott Jenson, Christian Crumlish, Adam Duvander, Marshall Kirkpatrick, and Josh Marinacci for reviewing drafts and outlines of the book as it came to life.

To my mentors Sheldon Renan, Douglas Rushkoff, and Deborah Heath. And to my parents, for raising me with a sense of wonder.

---

^[1] Image courtesy of PARC Research, photo credit Xerox PARC; used with permission.