VIII. Technology should respect social norms
Introduction
A device is used in front of other people. It occupies shared air, shared sightlines and shared space, and it carries information about its user to everyone nearby. A product that ignores the customs of the rooms it enters creates work for its user, who then has to manage the reaction it produces.
Norms are local and they change. A tool that respects them is legible to bystanders: people can tell what it is doing, whether it involves them, and whether they are being recorded, measured or addressed. Legibility is the mechanism. Ambiguity about what a device is doing is what makes people uneasy.
- A phone placed face down signals that a conversation has priority.
- A visible microphone reports that a room is being recorded.
- A ringer switch lets a device enter a quiet room without negotiation.
The Camera Shutter Sound
A mechanical camera makes a sound when the shutter opens, and that sound performed a social function long before anyone designed for it. Everyone within earshot learns that a photograph was taken. The subject knows. The bystander knows. Consent and objection both become possible because the act is audible.
Digital cameras have no mechanical reason to make the sound, and it was synthesized and retained. In Japan, handsets sold through domestic carriers emit a shutter tone that cannot be silenced, a practice adopted by the industry rather than imposed by statute, and South Korean handsets follow a similar convention. The tone exists to keep photography socially visible in crowded shared spaces.
A camera that respects social norms does not need to:
- Ask permission on a screen
- Explain its behavior to bystanders
- Hide what it is doing
- Be trusted on the basis of a policy document
Google Glass is the counterexample most often cited. A head-mounted camera with no reliable external indication of recording state left bystanders unable to tell whether they were being filmed, and the social response arrived faster than any product revision could.
Just as a shutter sound tells a room that a photograph was taken, well-designed technology makes its behavior legible to the people around its user.
Categories
* Pass-Through Technologies
- Principles of Calm Technology
- I. Technology should require the smallest possible amount of attention
- II. Technology should inform and create calm
- III. Technology should make use of the periphery
- IV. Technology should amplify the best of technology and the best of humanity
- V. Technology can communicate, but doesn't need to speak
- VI. Technology should work even when it fails
- VII. The right amount of technology is the minimum needed to solve the problem
- VIII. Technology should respect social norms
- Papers on Calm Technology
- Podcasts on Calm Technology
- Calm Tech Example Book Development
