Seems to have a lot of overlap with these principles.
"Technology should amplify the best of technology and the best of humanity".
But oh man is it infuriating when the Pebble shows me a spam message, for some reason it evokes hate against the spamming company to a much larger the degree than it does on my phone. I'm much more selective about what app can have notification on the Pebble. It's strange, the smartwatch just feel closer to me and it feels like people mess with me when "they use it" to disturb me for useless things.
Sorry, not really a point in this comment but it felt significant to the point of the website.
I'm surprised - does that mean ML/AI isn't calm ? Why ?
If this is true, then "tools for thought" can never be "calm technology," since creative thinking is not just about problem solving, but problem finding.
I completely agree that—when you're talking about thinking tools—"technology should amplify the best of technology and the best of humanity." But I don't see how it applies to any of the examples given (including "lavatory sign," trend graph, office window, and, of course, teapot).
> How many are notifications are necessary?
OT, but it seems no technology is so calm these days that people can effectively proofread the first 58 words of their web site—not even an author promoting her book.
Happening a lot, the boundary is fading slowly. The human dependency on machines is constantly increasing, intelligent/ AI machines take this to next level e.g. Self-driving cars.
http://homes.di.unimi.it/~boccignone/GiuseppeBoccignone_webp...
Use the singular 'they' instead. If you find that too grammatically egregious to be borne (as I do), alternate masculine and feminine pronouns (as I do). Or default to the feminine pronoun except when speaking specifically of someone male. Or default to the grammatical, if presently unfashionable, collective use of masculine pronouns. Just, seriously, do something that doesn't entail referring to a human as 'it'.
The popular ones are geared for you to rely on them indefinitely; many have "forever" memberships in addition to monthly and annual subscriptions. They perfectly fit the view of Iron Man vs Ultron apps, with the irony that, IMHO, apps in this category should strive to empower users with enough training and motivation for them to carry on their practice after a few months, not compel them to use them “forever”.
Do you have a link to the article? Google Gods did not favour me today.
Driving still seems like a waste of time, so self-driving cars make a lot of sense, but I agree that there really must be risk of people's skills during the routine practice of things eroding, such that they might be increasingly worthless or dangerous in emergency situations.
I.e. I want to be able to check a list of not-important but informative notifications once or twice a day, and a couple of apps I want it to buzz and let me know immediately.
As it stands right now, I allow more apps to buzz and get my attention with their notifications than I'd prefer, all because I don't want to miss that information entirely.
I am getting a Pebble2 watch soon, though, so I'm hoping I can use that as my 'priority' notification filter, and turn off the buzzing on my phone.
It is a bit like Unix principles (please, don't hit me!) - if program succeeded it should not output anything by default.
$ cp foo bar
$
My Roomba talks to me in my language when something is wrong. It is helpful for less common notifications (like clean the brush). But it is annoying for common things - like Roomba notifying that it stuck on the middle of carpet for no apparent reason. In common case I would prefer it to not occur than to have other means of notifying me.
Status lights should be so much dimmer than lights currently most devices have. With all the devices around me it sometimes looks like it's Christmas.
Modal popups are very hard to do right. I think many times it would be better to have simple means of undoing the action with non-modal popup and additional way to undo not that recent actions. I understand that it may be not that easy - i.e. removing something. For example I am baffled that adding a word to dictionary in Google Keyboard needs additional popup (that appears half a second later thanks to useless animation). I would prefer it to just show non obstructing popup with option to undo addition of the word.
I get call rings, txt message notifications, and almost nothing else until the Priority only mode expires.
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To make myself as plain as I can, I should give my standards for technological innovation in my own work. They are as follows:
1. The new tool should be cheaper than the one it replaces. 2. It should be at least as small in scale as the one it replaces. 3. It should do work that is clearly and demonstrably better than the one it replaces. 4. It should use less energy than the one it replaces. 5. If possible, it should use some form of solar energy, such as that of the body. 6. It should be repairable by a person of ordinary intelligence, provided that he or she has the necessary tools. 7. It should be purchasable and repairable as near to home as possible. 8. It should come from a small, privately owned shop or store that will take it back for maintenance and repair. 9. It should not replace or disrupt anything good that already exists, and this includes family and community relationships.
I forgot my food in beeping oven constantly, just because I semi-opened it to prevent beeps but did not extract contents because it was too hot. Even when I look at it, the fact that the door is not closed automagically means to my brain that there is nothing inside.
How it should be done: ding once, light inside. Open door -> turn it off.
There were older, desktop apps that made modal dialogs appear that blocked you from doing anything if you had an update, message, whatever. I later saw that turn into a dedicated box with significant chunk of screen. At least I could do other things. Later, there was a menu or window somewhere that could be opened with the notifications being smaller instead of the message itself. Later, on Xbox Live, they made the notifications pop up in top-center of screen with very little info in them. They also let me turn them off with a one-button method of checking if anything happened in-game. A further enhancement of this might be replacing the popup with a distinct, mellow, sound effect that blends into in-game sounds in such a way to stand out but not jolt a person out of the game. Not just preserving the mood of one but also not say masking sound of enemy footsteps.
So, in just that one area, things have improved remarkably from the time when developers said, "We're going to shove this in their faces and force them to pay attention." I'd love to see more such improvements across the board leading to calmer software.
I'm afraid that there will always be an underwhelming minority of technology users who make conscious choices to purchase and encourage calm technology.
One admittedly tepid hope is that society-scale evolution will eventually help. Communities that embrace calm technology will be more fit and ultimately successful than those that acquiesce to jarring, rude, and disruptive technologies that foster a passive, frantic, reactive, unreflective, and anxious consciousness.
Then you've bought into the bizarre, quixotic, and increasingly-being-rejected effort by Victorian elites to try to pretend that English is some strange constructed Latinate language and not, well, English.
And you should give up.
OTOH, if you really need to refer to a gender neutral abstract person in English, and really can't bring yourself to use "they", learn to use "one" properly. This can require restructuring sentence and not just dropping a different pronoun in, e.g., this:
the human should have total control over "how important" a given technology is to it.
one should have total control over "how important" a given technology is to oneself.I'd be curious to see this perspective detailed at greater length.
I get that objectification and dehumanization have been and continue to be huge problems, I just don't see an issue here. If you're talking about a specific person, it's weird and possibly offensive, but that's not the case here.
Others seem to. It may be worth taking their perspective into account along with your own. But that's your consideration to make.
I totally agree with this and love the calm technology principle as well. I'd like to draw attention to the "Time Well Spent" project started by Google's "product philosopher," as I think it's very similar and equally as important. http://timewellspent.io/
Some interesting reading: https://www.amazon.com/What-Dormouse-Said-Counterculture-Per...
Unless we're shut up in our own private rooms (and often enough, even then) we're all constantly getting the "Status Shouts" of devices completely unrelated to us. Is a truck down the street from your window set in reverse? You'll know. Did someone down the hall leave their cellphone unattended on their desk? You'll find out if they get a call. Goodness forbid that you share a building with someone who doesn't change the batteries in their smoke alarms! All of these are okay design decisions when considering one device and one human user, but in an environment where there can dozens of humans and thousands of devices in a city block, they become drastically less apt.
I do try to avoid basing arguments on the concept of offense, because there seem to be a lot of people for whom that is a red flag that terminates the possibility of further meaningful discussion, and also because I have some qualms of my own around the way it's used in modern discourse.
I nonetheless feel I should apologize for having, apparently without justice, taken you to be such a person, and felt it necessary as a result to argue with more care, and more circumlocution, than the situation apparently required. I'm sorry for that. Thanks for not being that guy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they#Trend_to_prescri...
Of course, the German version catches flak for being too close to "man" (Mann), and is sometimes replaced with frau (Frau meaning "woman"). So it goes.
A better goal is to design for easy deconstruction and recycling so that broken equipment doesn't end up in landfills.
I can sympathize with people who hate those noises, but I think the only practical solutions are for them to wear earplugs or move somewhere with lower population density.
For ex: rear back-up cameras on trucks, phones that only vibrate when they're in a dark pocket, smoke detectors that fall back on noise alarms only if you don't respond to a flashing light or email reminder, etc.
Phone numbers don't lead to other interesting ideas, that I can think of. Didn't dialing originally work by just picking up the handset and telling the operator who you wanted to talk to?
For example, if I go to a dealer to buy a car, if that process would be replaced with technology, then it would be wrong to make that technology to parrot the interactions I'd usually have with a human salesman. If technology is used to take orders in a restaurant and serve food, then imitating a waiter or waitress might be a marketing novelty, but it's not the appropriate way to do it. It's a different medium now, machines shouldn't act like humans.