Principles of Calm Technology

From Cyborg Anthro Wiki
Revision as of 18:26, 23 August 2026 by Caseorganic (talk | contribs) (added categories)

Principles of Calm Technology

Developed by Amber Case

I. Technology should require the smallest possible amount of attention

  • Technology can communicate, but doesn’t need to speak.
  • Create ambient awareness through different senses.
  • Communicate information without taking the user out of their environment or task.

II. Technology should inform and create calm

  • A person's primary task should not be computing, but being human.
  • Give people what they need to solve their problem, and nothing more.

III. Technology should make use of the periphery

  • A calm technology will move easily from the periphery of our attention, to the center, and back.
  • The periphery is informing without overburdening.

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

  • Design for people first.
  • Machines shouldn't act like humans.
  • Humans shouldn't act like machines.
  • Amplify the best part of each.

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

  • Does your product need to rely on voice, or can it use a different communication method?
  • Consider how your technology communicates status.

VI. Technology should work even when it fails

  • Think about what happens if your technology fails.
  • Does it default to a usable state or does it break down completely?

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

  • What is the minimum amount of technology needed to solve the problem?
  • Slim the feature set down so that the product does what it needs to do and no more.

VIII. Technology should respect social norms

  • Technology takes time to introduce to humanity.
  • What social norms exist that your technology might violate or cause stress on?
  • Slowly introduce features so that people have time to get accustomed to the product.

From calmtech.com accessed 2025 Jan 13.

Categories

Introduction

Attention has a center and an edge. The center holds one thing at a time. The edge holds a great many things at low resolution, and it is where a person keeps track of everything that is not the current task: the weather outside, the sound of a conversation in the next room, the position of a cup on a desk.

The periphery is not a lesser channel. It is a larger one. Information placed there is received without being processed as a decision. Moving something from the periphery to the center is expensive, and moving it back takes time. Gloria Mark's research at the University of California, Irvine found that workers took an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to return to an interrupted task (Mark, Gonzalez and Harris, "No Task Left Behind? Examining the Nature of Fragmented Work," CHI 2005).

  • Peripheral vision detects motion and change before the center identifies what moved.
  • Ambient sound reports the state of a building without anyone listening to it.
  • The weight of a bag on a shoulder reports its contents without inspection.

The Fuel Gauge

A fuel gauge sits below the driver's line of sight, inside the arc a driver already sweeps while checking mirrors and speed. It reports a continuous quantity through the angle of a needle, which the eye reads as a position rather than a number. Reading it costs a glance measured in fractions of a second, and the driver's attention returns to the road without a transition.

The gauge stays in the periphery for the entire trip and enters the center exactly once, when the low fuel lamp illuminates. That escalation is the design. A single quantity is monitored peripherally until it crosses a threshold that requires a decision, and only then does it ask for attention.

A gauge that uses the periphery does not need to:

  • Be read at a fixed interval
  • Be interpreted as a number
  • Be dismissed or acknowledged
  • Move to the center of attention while the quantity is unremarkable

Euro NCAP's 2026 protocol requires physical controls for turn signals, hazard lights, horn, windscreen wipers and the emergency call function to receive a top safety score, a change that reflects how much of driving depends on operations a driver can perform without looking.

Just as a fuel gauge reports a whole trip's worth of information from the edge of a driver's vision, well-designed technology places continuous status where a person is already looking.

-- Calm Technology

Retrieved from "https://cyborganthropology.com/index.php?title=Principles_of_Calm_Technology&oldid=6966"