Materials

Calm Technology Category

What materials does the product use?

Why the Question Belongs in Calm Technology

Calm technology is usually discussed in terms of attention: how a device signals, how much it demands, whether it informs from the periphery. Materials appear to be a separate concern, belonging to industrial design or sustainability. They are not, and the reason is that material choices determine a great deal of a product's behaviour before any software is written.

A material decides how a device asks for attention. A surface that glows demands the eye; a surface that changes texture, temperature, weight or position does not. Some of the most successful calm interfaces have been almost entirely material — a bowl that tilts, a ball that changes colour, a string that moves in a draught of network traffic, as in Natalie Jeremijenko's Dangling String. None of these can be ignored the way a notification can, and none of them interrupt.

Material also decides how a device ages, and ageing is a calm-technology property. An object that acquires patina — leather, wood, brass, uncoated aluminium — communicates its own history and tends to be kept. An object made of materials that only degrade — scratched gloss plastic, delaminating adhesive, a swelling battery — communicates only that it is failing, and tends to be replaced. The first kind of object recedes into a life; the second keeps announcing itself.

Questions to Ask

• What is it made of, and what happens to those materials at end of life? Are they separable, recyclable, or bonded together in a way that makes recovery impossible?
• Is the battery replaceable? In most portable products the battery has the shortest life of any component, which means it, and not the electronics, sets the product's lifespan. A glued battery converts a repairable object into a disposable one.
• Can it be opened? Screws rather than adhesive; documented fasteners rather than proprietary ones; available parts.
• How does it age? Will six years of use make it look owned or make it look broken?
• What does the material communicate when idle? Weight, temperature, texture and finish are continuous signals, present whether or not the device is powered.
• What is the embodied cost? The energy and extraction represented by manufacture, which for most electronics substantially exceeds lifetime operating energy.
• Is it repairable by the owner, or only by the manufacturer? This determines whether the object belongs to the person who bought it in any practical sense.

Materials and Runoff

Material choices are one of the principal levers on future runoff. A device whose value depends on a service will run off when the service ends, and nothing in its construction can prevent that. But a device that is physically repairable, whose parts are available and whose battery can be changed, remains useful to a second and third owner long after it has stopped being satisfying to the first — which is the mechanism behind hand-me-ups, and the difference between an object that circulates and one that goes to landfill.

Related Reading

• Calm Technology
• Future Runoff
• Hand Me Up Technology
• Frictional Interface
• Matt Gorbet