Principles of Calm Technology | Hacker News Reader

Principles of Calm Technology

calmtech.com

I love my Pebble, my phone is always on completely silent mode and nobody but me feels or hears the Pebble. It feels quite private. I can ignore it during conversions and see what it has to say whenever I look at my wrist later. I can blindly dismiss notifications, knowing they are still open on my phone for later. I never miss important calls but I can also refuse calls without looking away from someone I have a conversation with just by touching my wrist.

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 think it's relevant. I think there should be an addendum: the human should have total control over "how important" a given technology is to it. So for example, there's maybe 3 apps on my phone out of 50 that are allowed to use notifications. I'm always horrified when I pick up my mom's phone and it's swamped with notifications, popups in the status bar, lock screen flooded over, yuck.

Consider, when describing an arbitrary and even perhaps notional human in the singular, using literally any pronoun other than 'it'. Neuter humans are very rare, and, at least in English, using grammatically neutral pronouns to refer to humans has a long and unlovely history.

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'.

Referring to people as "it" is fairly common in colloquial Finnish, and there's no sordid associations there

We are not now speaking Finnish, colloquial or otherwise.

Why does it matter when the meaning is clear and unambiguous?

Why doesn't it?

Because the point of language is to communicate, and if you've communicated effectively then you're done. What is the history you were referring to? Does using "it" offend some people, or something?

Yes. "It" as a pronoun is used to denigrate marginalized group such as ethnic minorities, individuals who do not adhere to traditional binary gender norms, or other groups that one may wish to, in a way, remove their humanity through pronoun usage. "It," in modern English, is cold, unliving, and reserved for objects rather than living people.

Ok, I guess I see where you're coming from, although that sort of usage seems almost too over the top to happen in real life. But as I said in another comment, we're not referring to a specific person in this context, we're talking about an abstract human being. Unless there's a risk of denigrating "users of technology" or something, I don't see an issue.

> I don't see an issue

Others seem to. It may be worth taking their perspective into account along with your own. But that's your consideration to make.

Yes (again). It is sadly still very prevalent in trans/genderqueer/genderfucked communities, but I don't quite see the connection to this abstract human/spambot the grandparent was offended by/referring to.

Hardly offended, if it's me you mean there. I just think it's not a good habit to get into.

Does it make your communication more effective to structure it in a fashion which distracts from its substance?

No, so I guess I'm asking why you think it distracts from the substance. It seems unambiguously clear to me, and I can't immediately think of a way to take offense, especially in this context where the subject is just an abstract non-specific person.

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.

I think it distracts from the substance because this is the latest comment in a moderately sized and growing conversation which has nothing to do with the substance. To be sure, that conversation is one I started, but consider the possibility that other people, who are unlike me not obstreperous asses, might just quietly ignore whatever you have to say as a result of the linguistic choice with which I've taken such vocal issue.

Yes, I did consider that possibility, that's why I asked. legodt's comment about why it might be offensive is all I was looking for, I genuinely did not think of that interpretation.

That's reasonable.

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.

> Use the singular 'they' instead. If you find that too grammatically egregious to be borne

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.

might become:

  one should have total control over "how important" a given technology is to oneself.

> the bizarre, quixotic, and increasingly-being-rejected effort by Victorian elites

I'd be curious to see this perspective detailed at greater length.

Singular "they" is attested back to the 14th century. (Note that this would actually be Middle English!) It met a lot of resistance in the 19th century by various prescriptive grammar books.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they#Trend_to_prescri...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_prescription

Wider usage of "one" -- in German, man -- is something I miss from studying German. It's a pretty elegant solution when it can be used.

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.

I want a way to allow an app to give me "notifications", but only buzz and actually try to get my attention if it's an app that I've given "priority status" to.

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.

What phone do you have?

I think I have the setup you're after on my iPhone.

My Android 5.1 phone has a All/Priority/No notifications mechanism... I hold down the volume down button for a couple of seconds and I have a quick panel to choose which mode and duration selections for None/Priority. Requires going through Settings | Sounds | Interruptions and setting priority status per app, minor overhead.

I get call rings, txt message notifications, and almost nothing else until the Priority only mode expires.

Reminds me of these desiderata from an essay by Wendell Berry:

-----------

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.

Just wondering, is there any example of technological innovation that meets these criteria?

Probably not, since some of the points require changes to business models, not just technology.

All other things being equal, if you improve in just one of these dimensions, you are doing it right.

Only so long as other dimensions don't degrade. In practice, that's usually what happens.

Repairability is a pointless standard for hardware device innovation. If we had to design modern devices to be easily repairable then they would be so bulky, heavy, and expensive as to be pointless. Plus designing for repairability with more modular components would actually make devices less reliable, and more likely to need to be repaired in the first place.

A better goal is to design for easy deconstruction and recycling so that broken equipment doesn't end up in landfills.

I'm reminded of a recent article about how technology and automation should be Iron Man, not Ultron. Assist and empower the user, don't take over for them completely. This allows for human oversight, keeps skills relevant (for when the automation fails), and still allows for significant progress.

Seems to have a lot of overlap with these principles.

I’ve been thinking about this more for apps in the self-help category, such as meditation, yoga and fitness.

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.

http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2841313

After hardly driving for a good portion of a decade, then regularly driving again, the highway seemed pretty weird. As in, how are these people spending so much mental energy? Then after a week or two staying exactly where I wanted to be in the lane, and basics like knowing where empty spots in traffic were around me in case I needed to move to avoid something became second nature again, not requiring much conscious effort.

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.

This is a very old argument that goes way back to the beginning of the entire field with Douglas Engelbart and his augmented computing project. At the time he was an outsider who thought the future of computing was enabling humans to do more as opposed to creating a general AI that would do it for us.

Some interesting reading: https://www.amazon.com/What-Dormouse-Said-Counterculture-Per...

This leads off in interesting directions, though. For example, people complain that students shouldn't just use calculators, but in the developed world, the chances of not having access to a working calculator on a phone or computer are very small (that said, it's good to know what the machine is doing for you, even if you don't want to do it yourself). Compare that to phone numbers - even a generation ago, it was common to have memorized half-dozen 10 digit phone numbers for friends and family members. Are we diminished somehow now for having offloaded that to machines? Or was it work we shouldn't have ever had to take on?

Specifically regarding calculators, the idea is that knowing how to calculate aids in understanding later math that depends on calculation.

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?

I love the calm technology principles. A serious problem, though, is that the interests of the technology provider do not necessarily align with the interests of the technology user. Here is an example. (This is speculative on my part. Anyone who is more familiar with the history here, please chime in.) In the earliest days of telephone, it was in the interest of the phone company that callees answer incoming calls. No answer, no revenue. So, the phones generated jarring, noisy, almost violent clanging noises. We all became Pavlov's dogs for the phone company.

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.

> acquiesce to jarring, rude, and disruptive technologies that foster a passive, frantic, reactive, unreflective, and anxious consciousness.

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/

I love that people are thinking about how technology interacts with the user, since we're terrible enough at that still, but there's another aspect that this kind of thinking doesn't recognize, where we're arguably even worse- how technology interacts with non-users.

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.

So what would you propose as an alternative? Trucks beep when they reverse because people were literally run over by trucks. Smoke detectors beep when backup batteries are low because people died in fires.

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.

I'm sure there are plenty of possible design solutions that don't annoy others so much.

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.

There are "white noise" back up sounds that are used when the trucks are expected to be used at night.

Fascinating, here's a good demo video: https://youtu.be/psWBaxtK19g?t=1m11s

I wholeheartedly agree.

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
    $

Problem of course is if something is taking longer time. I prefer microwaves with single ding at the end to one that is beeping every 3 seconds (I have such one at my work). Of course microwaves have also clear progress bar. Android is guilty many times of doing something in background and not showing it at all. I think that abundance of log messages or showing progress is just laziness at users expense.

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 prefer microwaves with single ding at the end to one that is beeping every 3 seconds

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.

I like the article. Another commenter here gave a good example with the Android phones overloaded with notifications. I'm going to illustrate the right way with communications embedded into non-communication products.

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.

> Give people what they need to solve their problem, and nothing more

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.

Small typo: I think "How many are notifications are necessary?" should read "How many notifications are necessary?"

That jumped out at me, too.

me too. It made me feel less calm

Actually, the text was abundant with typos... But I can easily ignore that and rather focus on the content.

Not sure about this website, but the original essay by Mark Weiser should be required reading for HN crowd IMO:

http://homes.di.unimi.it/~boccignone/GiuseppeBoccignone_webp...

> Machines shouldn't act like humans

I'm surprised - does that mean ML/AI isn't calm ? Why ?

Maybe to emphasize that machines are there to make the human task easy but not let them get lazy and develop a hard dependency on the machine! As in - I can't do this without using some X machine, is a clear sign that we developed a hard dependency on the machine and we fail to learn/understand how to do the task without using the machine.

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.

It's been a very long time since humans haven't been dependent on machines. There's a legitimate question to how complex the supply chains are that produce those machines, and whether as a result it makes society and civilization more fragile (if I'm dependent on farm implements from a blacksmith in the center of town, that's different from being dependent on LED displays only made in 3 factories in the world, all of which are on the other side of the planet). But I think the general idea of "don't become dependent on machines" is a ship that sailed long before any of us were even born.

In context, they mean that machines should only amplify the best human traits, and vice versa. For example, a social network should amplify human liking/loving and not human disliking/hating.

It highlights the issue that when a machine does a task, usually the best way to do it will be not like a human would do it. Even if we had cheap full-general-AI humanoid robots to do the tasks, it may be better to do the necessary interactions as with a machine, not as with a fellow human - even in a pure business transaction much of our communication is determined by social factors, the fundamental person-to-person relationships.

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.

I love this piece. I also feel pessimistic about calm tech because a lot of tech companies have perverse incentives to addict and perpetually disturb their users in order to gain mindshare and sell ads.

There needs to be a generation or current of people in tech working against the trend to addict and disturb their users for profit maximization and pushing for some kind of ethical limit.

I've been on this website many times and read the book. I long for the day everyone follows these principles.

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

Have you read any Don Norman? Like Emotional Design or The Design of Everyday Things? Based on the principles (and even the examples) given here, I'm wondering how this book adds to that work.

"Technology should work even when it fails" was the tenant that seemed the most relevant to that book. Usually when technology fails there’s a good chance the user will suffer in a way, such as feeling embarrassment or having to repeat a task again. Caring more about how technology fails gracefully would help figure out how to mitigate negative feelings the user might experience if such edge cases happen.

I enjoyed the article. I have often thought that any new device should add no net complexity. Preferably it should reduce overall complexity.

Centering lists so that the bullets do not line up does not make me calm...</ocd>

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