Calm Technology - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21799736 - Dec 2019 (155 comments)
Principles of Calm Technology - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12389344 - Aug 2016 (66 comments)
Calm Technology - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9107526 - Feb 2015 (1 comment)
Also:
Designing Calm Technology (1995) - https://web.archive.org/web/19990225161500/http://www.ubiq.c... - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7976258 - July 2014 (2 comments)
In the early this year, I watched a video concept from Lightform LFX. https://youtu.be/3XIGxNP3-Mk
I think that's very interesting and futuristic. It's like just a AR world by without the complex device. Live as usual but more convenient. And more like human instead of a Pavlov's dog
As usual, I've checked and updated the broken links to archive.org. (One of my favorites is the 1995 Computer Chronicals video at the end with a profile of Mark's band, Severe Tire Damage, the first band to ever perform live over the internet, who upstaged the Rolling Stones over MBone, using up half the bandwidth of the internet on Friday, November 18, 1994!)
History of the Internet - Severe Tire Damage, The Internet’s First Live Band:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZn0HW9OHD4
Mark Weiser passed away on April 27, 1999, from liver cancer.
====
There's this related article:
Computers should expose their internal workings as a 6th sense (interconnected.org)
https://interconnected.org/home/2021/08/27/data_sense
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28330031
To which I posted this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28351064
Natalie Jeremijenko: LiveWire, Dangling String; Mark Weiser: Calm Technology, Ubiquitous Computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calm_technology
>Calm Technology
>History
>The phrase "calm technology" was first published in the article "Designing Calm Technology", written by Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown in 1995.[1] The concept had developed amongst researchers at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in addition to the concept of ubiquitous computing.[3]
>Weiser introduced the concept of calm technology by using the example of LiveWire or "Dangling String". It is an eight-foot (2.4 m) string connected to the mounted small electric motor in the ceiling. The motor is connected to a nearby Ethernet cable. When a bit of information flows through that Ethernet cable, it causes a twitch of the motor. The more the information flows, the motor runs faster, thus creating the string to dangle or whirl depending on how much network traffic is. It has aesthetic appeal; it provides a visualization of network traffic but without being obtrusive.[4]
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20190508225438/https://www.karls...
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20131214054651/http://ieeexplore...
PDF: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~./jasonh/courses/ubicomp-sp2007/paper...
[4] https://web.archive.org/web/20110706212255/https://uwspace.u...
PDF: https://web.archive.org/web/20170810073340/https://uwspace.u...
>According to Weiser, LiveWire is primarily an aesthetic object, a work of art, which secondarily allows the user to know network traffic, while expending minimal effort. It assists the user by augmenting an office with information about network traffic. Essentially, it moves traffic information from a computer screen to the ‘real world’, where the user can acquire information from it without looking directly at it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natalie_Jeremijenko#Live_Wire_...
>Natalie Jeremijenko
>Live Wire (Dangling String), 1995
>In 1995,[9] as an artist-in-residence at Xerox PARC in Palo Alto, California under the guidance of Mark Weiser, she created an art installation made up of LED cables that lit up relative to the amount of internet traffic. The work is now seen as one of the first examples of ambient or "calm" technology.[10][11]
[9] https://web.archive.org/web/20110526023949/http://mediaartis...
[10] https://web.archive.org/web/20100701035651/http://iu.berkele...
>Weiser comments on Dangling String: "Created by artist Natalie Jeremijenko, the "Dangling String" is an 8 foot piece of plastic spaghetti that hangs from a small electric motor mounted in the ceiling. The motor is electrically connected to a nearby Ethernet cable, so that each bit of information that goes past causes a tiny twitch of the motor. A very busy network causes a madly whirling string with a characteristic noise; a quiet network causes only a small twitch every few seconds. Placed in an unused corner of a hallway, the long string is visible and audible from many offices without being obtrusive."
[11] https://web.archive.org/web/20120313074738/http://ipv6.com/a...
>Mark Weiser suggested the idea of enormous number of ubiquitous computers embedding into everything in our everyday life so that we use them anytime, anywhere without the knowledge of them. Today, ubiquitous computing is still at an early phase as it requires revolutionary software and hardware technologies.
====
And this article:
Humanist Interface: The Entrenchment of Modern Minimalism (elischiff.com)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9069634
Archive link:
https://web.archive.org/web/20150324235751/https://elischiff...
I posted this:
"The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it." [...]
"Such a disappearance is a fundamental consequence not of technology, but of human psychology. Whenever people learn something sufficiently well, they cease to be aware of it. When you look at a street sign, for example, you absorb its information without consciously performing the act of reading.. Computer scientist, economist, and Nobelist Herb Simon calls this phenomenon "compiling"; philosopher Michael Polanyi calls it the "tacit dimension"; psychologist TK Gibson calls it "visual invariants"; philosophers Georg Gadamer and Martin Heidegger call it "the horizon" and the "ready-to-hand", John Seely Brown at PARC calls it the "periphery". All say, in essence, that only when things disappear in this way are we freed to use them without thinking and so to focus beyond them on new goals."
-Mark Weiser, The Computer for the 21st Century:
https://web.archive.org/web/20141022035044/http://www.ubiq.c...
"A good tool is an invisible tool. By invisible, I mean that the tool does not intrude on your consciousness; you focus on the task, not the tool. Eyeglasses are a good tool -- you look at the world, not the eyeglasses. The blind man tapping the cane feels the street, not the cane. Of course, tools are not invisible in themselves, but as part of a context of use. With enough practice we can make many apparently difficult things disappear: my fingers know vi editing commands that my conscious mind has long forgotten. But good tools enhance invisibility."
-Mark Weiser, The World is not a Desktop, ACM Interactions:
https://web.archive.org/web/20141109145219/http://www.ubiq.c...
====
Also this article:
Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans (1975) (depauw.edu)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17349026
https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/5/lem5art.htm
I posted this:
Mark Weiser once told me that Ubik was one of his inspirations for Ubiquitous Computing.
https://web.archive.org/web/20050307024357/http://www.ubiq.c...
>Ubiquitous computing names the third wave in computing, just now beginning. First were mainframes, each shared by lots of people. Now we are in the personal computing era, person and machine staring uneasily at each other across the desktop. Next comes ubiquitous computing, or the age of calm technology, when technology recedes into the background of our lives. Alan Kay of Apple calls this "Third Paradigm" computing.
https://blog.canary.is/from-tesla-to-touchscreens-the-journe...
>One year earlier, in 1998, Mark Weiser described it a little differently, stating that, “Ubiquitous computing is roughly the opposite of virtual reality. Where virtual reality puts people inside a computer-generated world,” Weiser asserted,“ubiquitous computing forces the computer to live out here in the world with people.” This wasn’t the first time someone broached the idea of IoT. In the early 1980s, students at Carnegie Mellon’s Computer Science department created the first IoT Coke machine. Author Philip K. Dick wrote about the smart home in the 1969 sci-fi novel Ubik, and four decades before, inventor and engineer Nikola Tesla addressed the concept in Colliers Magazine. In an amazingly prescient 1926 interview, Tesla said,
>"When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain…We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance…and the instruments through which we shall be able to do this will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubik
“Five cents, please,” his front door said when he tried to open it. One thing, anyhow, hadn’t changed. The toll door had an innate stubbornness to it; probably it would hold out after everything else. After everything except it had long since reverted, perhaps in the whole city … if not the whole world.
He paid the door a nickel, hurried down the hall to the moving ramp which he had used only minutes ago.
[…]
“I don’t have any more nickels,” G. G. said. “I can’t get out.”
Glancing at Joe, then at G. G., Pat said, “Have one of mine.” She tossed G. G. a coin, which he caught, an expression of bewilderment on his face. The bewilderment then, by degrees, changed to aggrieved sullenness.
“You sure shot me down,” he said as he deposited the nickel in the door’s slot. “Both of you,” he muttered as the door closed after him. “I discovered her. This is really a cutthroat business, when —“ His voice faded out as the door clamped shut. There was, then, silence.
[…]
“I’ll go get my test equipment from the car,” Joe said, starting towards the door.
“Five cents, please,”
“Pay the door,” Hoe said to G. G. Ashwood.
[...]
“Can I borrow a couple of poscreds from you?” Joe said. “So I can eat breakfast?”
“Mr. Hammond warned me that you would try to borrow money from me. He informed me that he already provided you with sufficient funds to pay for your hotel room, plus a round of drinks, as well as —“
“Al based his estimate on the assumption that I would rent a more modest room than this."
====
Also this video I posted to HN on Mark's birthday:
Time lapse doodle: Mark Weiser’s 1991 “Computer for the 21st Century” [video] (youtube.com)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27929430
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkHALBOqn7s
I posted this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27929598
Today (July 23) is Mark Weiser's birthday, who is considered the father of Ubiquitous Computing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Weiser
https://web.archive.org/web/19990204012721/http://www.ubiq.c...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubiquitous_computing
>During one of his talks, Weiser outlined a set of principles describing ubiquitous computing:
>The purpose of a computer is to help you do something else.
>The best computer is a quiet, invisible servant.
>The more you can do by intuition the smarter you are; the computer should extend your unconscious.
>Technology should create calm.
>In Designing Calm Technology, Weiser and John Seely Brown describe calm technology as "that which informs but doesn't demand our focus or attention."
https://www.karlstechnology.com/blog/designing-calm-technolo...
https://web.archive.org/web/19990117104244/http://www.ubiq.c...
>Ubiquitous computing names the third wave in computing, just now beginning. First were mainframes, each shared by lots of people. Now we are in the personal computing era, person and machine staring uneasily at each other across the desktop. Next comes ubiquitous computing, or the age of calm technology, when technology recedes into the background of our lives. Alan Kay of Apple calls this "Third Paradigm" computing.
As manager of the Xerox PARC Computer Science Laboratory, he wrote the seminal 1992 Scientific American article, "The Computer for the 21st Century". He became Chief Technology Officer of Xerox PARC in 1996.
Draft:
https://rauterberg.employee.id.tue.nl/presentations/Marc_Wei...
September 1991 Scientific American article:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-computer-for-...
Scan:
https://www.lri.fr/~mbl/Stanford/CS477/papers/Weiser-SciAm.p...
Time Lapse Doodle Summary:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkHALBOqn7s&ab_channel=Nicol...
Mark taught Computer Science at the University of Maryland, and became chairman of the CS department in 1986. Under his guidance, the department received a grant of 40 Xerox Star workstations, plus file servers and laser printers, from Xerox PARC, and another grant from NSF for Z-Mob, a Z-80 parallel processor, "The Computer of the Future, using The Processor of the Past", which they used to buy Sun workstations.
https://www.cs.umd.edu/sites/default/files/zelkowitz-report....
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21756938
He contributed to the Boehm–Demers–Weiser Garbage Collector, which works with most unmodified C programs by replacing malloc() and realloc() and removing free() calls. It can also be used to detect memory leaks in non-garbage-collected programs. He used it for the Portable Common Runtime, porting the Cedar programming language and runtime system to Unix.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boehm_garbage_collector
http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/xerox/parc/techReport...
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/74851.74862
Mark was also the drummer for the avant-garde rock band, "Severe Tire Damage", the first band to broadcast live over the Internet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_Tire_Damage_(band)
https://archive.org/details/CC1232_internet
>The Computer Chronicals, 1995: In the mid 1990's many people were on line, but the internet and the world wide web were still a new phenomenon. This program looks at the new open world of the web. Demonstrations include Eudora, Anarchy, the WELL, WinCIM, InterACT.net, and HoTMetal Pro HTML Editor. Guests include New York Times technology writer John Markoff. Also features a profile of the band Severe Tire Damage, the first band to ever perform live over the internet. Originally broadcast in 1995. Copyright 1995 Stewart Cheifet Productions.
Mark Weiser passed away on April 27, 1999, from liver cancer.
The term "Pervasive Computing" is IBM's attempted rebranding of "Ubiquitous Computing" to make it seem less calm, more paternalistic and penetrating, like nanotech gray goo spreading out and filling the whole world, that appeals more to military funding and commercial exploitation than to peaceful ethical applications.
It's no surprise that the even more obviously phallic term "The Internet of Things" evolved from "Pervasive Computing".
These articles makes some good points about the terms:
https://www.computerworld.com/article/2593079/ubiquitous--pe...
>Ubiquitous? Pervasive? Sorry, they don't compute
>I just found out that ubiquitous computing and pervasive computing aren't the same thing. "What?!?" you're saying. "I'm shocked." Yes, brace yourselves. This time it appears to be the scientists, not the marketers, who adopted everyday terms to describe their once-futuristic technology, making things very confusing now that other folks are using those ordinary words -- sometimes interchangeably -- without their particular nuances in mind.
>Now, I'm not going to blame anybody here -- they're a lot smarter than I am, and they started their research a long time ago -- but I'm going to suggest that things have come far enough that there are easier ways to explain what is meant by these terms. First, let's look at what they mean.
>Ubiquitous means everywhere. Pervasive means "diffused throughout every part of." In computing terms, those seem like somewhat similar concepts. Ubiquitous computing would be everywhere, and pervasive computing would be in all parts of your life. [...]
>Where IBM is a leader in the pervasive computing universe -- it has a whole division, aptly called the Pervasive Computing division, devoted to it -- Xerox started the ubiquitous thing back in 1988. [...]
https://internetofthingsagenda.techtarget.com/definition/per...
>pervasive computing (ubiquitous computing)
>[...] The term pervasive computing followed in the late 1990s, largely popularized by the creation of IBM's pervasive computing division. Though synonymous today, Professor Friedemann Mattern of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich noted in a 2004 paper that:
>Weiser saw the term 'ubiquitous computing' in a more academic and idealistic sense as an unobtrusive, human-centric technology vision that will not be realized for many years, yet [the] industry has coined the term 'pervasive computing' with a slightly different slant. Though this also relates to pervasive and omnipresent information processing, its primary goal is to use this information processing in the near future in the fields of electronic commerce and web-based business processes. In this pragmatic variation -- where wireless communication plays an important role alongside various mobile devices such as smartphones and PDAs -- ubiquitous computing is already gaining a foothold in practice.
>Pervasive computing and the internet of things
>The internet of things (IoT) has largely evolved out of pervasive computing. Though some argue there is little or no difference, IoT is likely more in line with pervasive computing rather than Weiser's original view of ubiquitous computing.
====
English Word Of The Day: PERVASIVE
https://www.espressoenglish.net/english-word-of-the-day-perv...
>Hi students! Today’s adjective of the day is pervasive. Not persuasive – that’s a word meaning something that can easily persuade or convince you, change your mind. This is pervasive, with a V in the middle. Let’s say it together – pervasive. Per-VAS-ive
>Something that is pervasive has the quality that it tends to spread and fill up an area, so that it ends up having a wide influence or effect. A simple example is a strong smell, maybe you cook with strong spices like curry and you could say that the smell of curry is pervasive. This doesn’t mean it’s good or bad, just that it tends to spread and fill the whole house.
>We typically use this word to describe ideas, feelings, and trends that tend to spread and not stay small. For example, racism is a pervasive problem in many countries. It’s something that affects a lot of people, and society in general.
>Or you could say that social media has become pervasive, because this technology has spread throughout the world and so many people use it, and it also affects our daily lives a lot.
>So the adjective pervasive simply means widespread, but as I was looking up examples, I realized that we do often tend to use it for negative things.
>A pervasive sense of inferiority would be a lack of confidence that impacts your whole life and your whole personality; a pervasive disease would be one that affects many systems throughout your body. And again we often talk about pervasive problems in society, like racism or poverty or depression, saying that they are pervasive means they affect a lot of people and wide areas of society.
>Got it? So try to write your own sentence – what’s a pervasive problem in your company, your school, or your country? That’s all for today – thanks for joining me, and I’ll talk to you tomorrow.
Mark and I were discussing his ubicomp work 32 years ago, a few years before his SciAm article, and I asked him about the term "real virtuality", and he explained:
Date: Tue, 12 Dec 89 21:43:27 -0800
From: Mark Weiser <mark@arisia.Xerox.COM>
To: don@mimsy.umd.edu
Subject: real virtuality
Actually, my term was "embodied virtuality".
-mark
>Scientific American: The Computer for the 21st Century, September 1991
>By pushing computers into the background, embodied virtuality will make individuals more aware of the people on the other ends of their computer links.
>[...] Neither an explication of the principles of ubiquitous computing nor a list of the technologies involved really gives a sense of what it would be like to live in a world full of invisible widgets. Extrapolating from today’s rudimentary fragments of embodied virtuality is like trying to predict the publication of Finnegans Wake shortly after having inscribed the first clay tablets. Nevertheless, the effort is probably worthwhile: [...]
>[...] Indeed, the opposition between the notion of virtual reality and ubiquitous, invisible computing is so strong that some of us use the term “embodied virtuality” to refer to the process of drawing computers out of their electronic shells. The “virtuality” of computer-readable data—all the different ways in which they can be altered, processed and analyzed—is brought into the physical world.
>[...] Most computers that participate in embodied virtuality will be invisible in fact as well as in metaphor. Already computers in light switches, thermostats, stereos and ovens help to activate the world. These machines and more will be interconnected in a ubiquitous network. As computer scientists, however, my colleagues and I have focused on devices that transmit and display information more directly. We have found two issues of crucial importance: location and scale. Little is more basic to human perception than physical juxtaposition, and so ubiquitous computers must know where they are. (Today’s computers, in contrast, have no idea of their location and surroundings.) If a computer knows merely what room it is in, it can adapt its behavior in significant ways without requiring even a hint of artificial intelligence.
>[...] How many tabs, pads and board-size writing and display surfaces are there in a typical room? Look around you: at the inch scale, include wall notes, titles on book spines, labels on controls, thermostats and clocks, as well as small pieces of paper. Depending on the room, you may see more than 100 tabs, 10 or 20 pads and one or two boards. This leads to our goal for initially deploying the hardware of embodied virtuality: hundreds of computers per room.
https://plumelabs.com/ - track your exposure to pollutants
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodney_Brooks
He and his colleagues invented "Subsumption Architecture" in 1986, which he later applied to the Roomba.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsumption_architecture
>Subsumption architecture is a reactive robotic architecture heavily associated with behavior-based robotics which was very popular in the 1980s and 90s. The term was introduced by Rodney Brooks and colleagues in 1986. Subsumption has been widely influential in autonomous robotics and elsewhere in real-time AI.
>Overview: Subsumption architecture is a control architecture that was proposed in opposition to traditional AI, or GOFAI. Instead of guiding behavior by symbolic mental representations of the world, subsumption architecture couples sensory information to action selection in an intimate and bottom-up fashion.
>It does this by decomposing the complete behavior into sub-behaviors. These sub-behaviors are organized into a hierarchy of layers. Each layer implements a particular level of behavioral competence, and higher levels are able to subsume lower levels (= integrate/combine lower levels to a more comprehensive whole) in order to create viable behavior. For example, a robot's lowest layer could be "avoid an object". The second layer would be "wander around", which runs beneath the third layer "explore the world". Because a robot must have the ability to "avoid objects" in order to "wander around" effectively, the subsumption architecture creates a system in which the higher layers utilize the lower-level competencies. The layers, which all receive sensor-information, work in parallel and generate outputs. These outputs can be commands to actuators, or signals that suppress or inhibit other layers.: 8–12, 15–16
R. A. Brooks (1986), "A Robust Layer Control System for a Mobile Robot", IEEE Journal of Robotics and Automation RA-2, 14-23.:
https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a160833.pdf
R. Brooks and A. Flynn (Anita M. Flynn) (1989), "Fast, cheap, and out of control: A robot invasion of the solar system," J. Brit. Interplanetary Soc., vol. 42, no. 10, pp. 478–485, 1989. (The paper later gave rise to the title of the film Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, and the paper's concepts arguably have been seen in practice in the 1997 Mars Pathfinder and then 2004 Mars Exploration Rover Mission.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast,_Cheap_%26_Out_of_Control
https://www.austinchronicle.com/screens/1997-11-14/518907/
>Fast, Cheap & Out of Control: Interview With Filmmaker Errol Morris
https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/08/21/133411/rodney-br...
>Rodney Brooks: The professor who got robots zipping through the world—and cleaning house—by challenging conventional wisdom in AI.
>Rodney Brooks was hot, bored, and isolated at his in-laws’ home in Thailand when he had an inspiration that would redirect the field of robotics and lead to Roomba vacuums in millions of homes.
>It was December 1984. Brooks was turning 30, and as a new member of the MIT faculty, he was trying to get robots to move about in the world. If they could, they might grant wishes from science fiction: venture into dangerous places, explore space, clean our houses.
https://www.wired.com/story/roomba-robot-consciousness-enlig...
>My Roomba Has Achieved Enlightenment: To my robovac, hitting a doorjamb and cleaning with dispatch are one and the same. There is no success or failure—these concepts have merged.
>ALL THROUGH THE fall my head was spinning, and I steered into the spin by watching Fast, Cheap & Out of Control.
>Errol Morris' rhapsodic 1997 documentary about a bunch of monomaniacs features a xylophone-heavy score and the roboticist Rodney Brooks. I wanted to hear Brooks dilate on robots in his cosmic way again.
They pointed me to:
https://plumvillage.app/the-social-dilemma-how-bad-is-social...
https://mindful.technology/mindful-web-design/
https://community.humanetech.com/
Hopefully this is helpful to someone who's interested in calm tech.
My Crazy Giraffe Whistling Tea Kettle That Sounds Like A Car Horn! (hopefully especially rare!):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYro3fpa5GA
A boiling kettle singing "Tea for Two" (extremely rare: a limited run of 200!):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYro3fpa5GA
>A kettle designed by American engineer Charles Hutter sings 'Tea for Two' when it boils. Read about it in the July 2014 issue of Saga Magazine
How the musical tea kettle came to be and die
https://musicalteakettle.com/blogs/news/how-the-musical-teak...
>Well before the astonishing success of the Rabbit, Riki was on the hunt for new products. Her T42 kettle was born during a 1980’s cocktail party conversation in Manhattan. Riki was always trying to create new products to sell, and had this idea for a teakettle playing a nice tune when water came to a boil. Riki related this idea to a woman who claimed her son-in-law was a mechanical genius who could create such a kettle. And he did!
>A few months later, Riki received a long tube that contained blueprints and schematics showing the design for a teakettle that plays Irving Caesar’s 1925 hit “Tea for Two” using steam power. The man who created this as nothing more than a challenge is Charles Hutter, founder of the Aeronautical engineering company Click Bond.
>Charles and Colleen Hutter, and Riki and Bob Larimer, together made a trip to Japan to prospect some manufacturers. While on the train, Rikki recalls Charles said, “We may as well make it beautiful.” Charles designed the kettle to be made from a billet of stainless steel, with a minimum of seams and a smoothly curved shape. The ingenious tune-playing steam-driven mechanism was made in the USA, with the kettle body produced in Japan, then Korea, and finally in China. All producers eventually found it too challenging to produce the kettle design at a competitive price; the designer’s insistence on the kettle’s form required many time-consuming and costly manufacturing operations. Nevertheless, a large production run was manufactured and marketed. [...]