Calm Tech Institute
About
The Calm Tech Institute is an organisation that develops standards and certification for technology designed to work with human attention rather than against it. It was founded by Amber Case in 2024, and builds on the concept of calm technology developed by Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown at Xerox PARC in the 1990s.[1]
The institute describes its work as "a process for designing technology that works with human attention, instead of against it."
The Eight Principles
The institute's stated principles of calm technology are:
- Require the smallest possible amount of attention
- Inform and create calm
- Make use of the periphery
- Amplify the best of technology and the best of humanity
- Communicate without speaking
- Still work when it fails
- The minimum tech needed to solve the problem
- Respect social norms
Two of these deserve particular note because they are unusual in design standards. "Still work when it fails" makes graceful degradation a criterion rather than an afterthought: a device whose basic function depends on a working network connection or a live server fails completely rather than partially, and the institute treats that as a design defect rather than an acceptable trade. "Respect social norms" brings the social consequences of a device — what it does to a room, to a conversation, to the people who did not buy it — inside the evaluation.
Calm Tech Certified
The institute's principal instrument is Calm Tech Certified™, a standard established in 2024 with its first class of certified products announced in early 2025.[2]
Certification evaluates products against criteria including periphery engagement, tactility, material harmony and durability. It runs alongside a partner programme for integrators.
The interesting move is structural rather than rhetorical. Design principles published as advice are widely admired and rarely applied, because nothing in a product's commercial evaluation depends on them. A certification mark attempts to change that by attaching the principles to a purchasing signal — the same mechanism used by energy ratings, organic labelling and fair trade marks. Whether it works depends on whether buyers come to look for it, which is an open question and the standard difficulty for any voluntary standard.
Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology
Nearly every concept on this site describes a problem: attention capture, friction, fragmented attention, runoff, devices that fail when a service ends. The Calm Tech Institute is an attempt to act on the diagnosis rather than restate it, and its criteria are worth reading as a compact list of what this body of critique implies for a physical product.
The durability and materials criteria in particular connect the attention argument to the industrial ecology one: a device that is repairable, that does not depend on a remote service, and that ages well is both calmer and less wasteful, and the two properties turn out to have the same causes.
Related Reading
External Links
References
- ↑ Principles, Calm Tech Institute; see also the founding announcement.
- ↑ Announcing Calm Tech Certified and the First Class of Certified Products.
