I recently came across a discussion of Calm Technology when looking at an article on The Atlantic: The Joy of ‘Calm Technology’. Turned out that the Calm Technology concept was introduced by My Xerox colleagues Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown at PARC in the 90’s. Wonder why I have not heard of them back then.
With the introduction of new technologies, such as Smart Homes and IoTs, we are now offered many more choices and conveniences to monitor and control more and more sensors and devices. While technology was supposed to help us, we end up surrounding ourselves with more gadgets that require our attention to install, setup and manage them. This is especially difficult for folks who really need the help. As we get older and less abled, we do not need more complexities. We heed technology to simplify the complexities and not to introduce new ones.
Hopefully, something could be done about it. In the last blog, I talked about the concept of the intelligent vs. Smart Home. Maybe with the introduction of an Intelligent Home Architecture, we can enable the connected devices to communicate with each other and “hide” the complexities. The Intelligent system will only communicate to us when our attention is needed for our sake in a manner that is “calm” and “natural”.
BTW, the picture used in this blog is from the cover of the O’Reilly book “Designing Calm Technology”. It is available from O’Reilly Media and Amazon.com! Also, the Calm Technology Video Course is now available from O’Reilly Media!