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Calm Technology

calmtech.com

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Past threads:

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)

Thought this looked familiar.

Mark Weiser was my friend and mentor at the University of Maryland, so I've posted some stuff about his work and life here in the past.

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...

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://std.org/

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.

> Ubiquitous computing is roughly the opposite of virtual reality. Where virtual reality puts people inside a computer-generated world, ubiquitous computing forces the computer to live out here in the world with people.

> -Mark Weiser

This sounds more like my future than the vision put forwards by Meta.

Totally, I agree!

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

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jasonh/courses/ubicomp-sp2007/papers...

>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.

Thanks for the link, it was an interesting read 20 years on.

Where does AR sit between Metaverse and Ubiquitous Computing, the middle path seems like the sweet spot to me.

Any altered reality that has facebook as it's initiator is not a reality for me. I'll just go live in the woods instead and write manifestos about how important dirt and air are in all our lives.

I agree with all this, but didn't notice much talk about the business needs that lead to intrusive products and how to avoid and if necessary regulate those.

If we just ask people very nicely to not make lots money by ruining society, things will not go well.

Ding ding ding.

I've loved this book since reading it, but it basically boils down to practices you can only use in applications no one is paying attention to (i.e. I slip calmer patterns into POCs all the time).

The nasty practices are used because they make money, and money pays the rent.

One day, maybe, humans will work out the kinks of socialism and calm tech alike.

people of color is burned into my brain from reading the news. I had to look up POC - "proof of concept".

I thought it was a new craptocurrency technique: POC = Proof Of Cash. Anyone who has a lot of cash can generate as much craptocurrency as they want! The rich get richer, the poor get fuckeder.

Maybe Proof Of Cash is just a more honest synonym for Proof Of Stake.

> Machines shouldn't act like humans.

I'm pretty sure Silicon Valley is just getting started at walking all over this one, and the end results are going to be horrifying. Or maybe just annoying.

I never want something to brightly say "it looks like you're writing a letter", even if it's right. Even if the computer was smart enough to write the letter for me, better than I would have. Even if GMail has read a trillion emails and thinks it knows exactly what everyone's replies should be.

No, just shut up and let me write, let me work, let me live. No, I don't want to have a relationship with a machine. You be the tool; let me do the thinking.

Agreed.

One of the first things I turn off in any application is spelling correction.

I don't mind red and blue squigglies under words. It's presenting a passive information channel in a mellow way, and frees me to do things like look away from what I'm typing while I'm typing it, and then be able to later find (most) my spelling errors at a quick glance. To me, that feels like a reasonably appropriate division of labor.

On the other hand, my phone's autocorrect is a nuisance. It's constantly trying to inappropriately switch "it's" and "its" or "their" and "they're", especially when it's the first word of the sentence and the algorithm has absolutely no way of knowing how the sentence will unroll. That's a distraction that has the opposite effect. It makes a greater demand on my attention by forcing me to watch my typing like a hawk to make sure autocorrect isn't inserting errors.

I'm also REALLY not a fan of the grammar recommendations where it suggests edits "for clarity" while subtly shifting the meaning. Unfortunately, I think the reccomendations will become self-fulfilling: By forcing people to converge on a certain style of very simple grammatical constructions in standard writing tools, that WILL become a de-facto standard and deviating from it will make your writing less familiar and less clear.

I run a personal LanguageTool server and love it.

oh please yes. also if every recommendation system could go burn in hell... no youtube, I don't want you to choose which song is going to play next, unless I explicitely ask you to do so. Even better would be every semi-automated-insufferable-ai-and-heuristics-based thing just die (like google's search results always changing places depending on who's doing the search), that would be great! Or typing prediction always changing on android phones, this drives me crazy.

Using internet today is so stress-inducing because of all those obscure behaviours and especially non-repeatable outcomes! Using a computer should always bring repeatable outcomes before anything else, "intelligence" should be opt-in !

I love internet radio and YouTube recommendations. Just wish YT didn't autoplay by default.

There's an option do disable it. Should be a button below the video.

My experience is that that option becomes re-enabled pretty often, even when I'm logged in and on the same device. It should be an account-wide option that's preserved and respected across all devices.

Also like a dozen plugins to stop autoplay so that it doesn't get turned back on.

All those have ways of being turned off. However, removing Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram and the like from your life will lower stress far more than you think. The always on mentality really needs to go.

we'll figure out how to get out of the uncanny valley.

I like how it breaks the dichotomy between high tech and low tech. An interesting middle ground overall, almost a new (to me) angle on its own to consider tech.

A few comments on the examples:

* the Jawbone Up is well designed but it still falls under the "quantified self" tech, which as a category, relies solely on user attention, notwithstanding the data privacy concerns of sending sleep data to a 3rd party.

* Roomba. Roomba not only is calm tech (as per their definition), it _feels_ alive. The designers added the subtle touch of not getting it to clean in straight lines, it looks like it wanders and searches more dust to actually accomplish its duty. The motion patterns of the Roomba are a great design achievement, and I'd very much like to know how much thought has been put into them.

Isn't the roomba mostly random? At least my old model surely looked like it. Random enough that if you let it run long enough it will overlap... enough.

Having just bought a robot vacuum cleaner, my understanding is that the more recent versions abandoned the “random by design“ approach in favor of mapping the room a little bit. I assume sensors got good enough in the last few years to allow that strategy.

I doubt the movement pattern of Roomba you observed is to make it feel alive.

Early Roombas had no sensors so they implemented randomization in movement and bounces to allow it to cover the room. With newer models they received sensors and started to clean in straight lines - depending on the manufacturer it may be first around the edges and then straight. Similar to how a human would mow a lawn.

damn. If you're right, that says a lot about how we humanized the poor little thing. He's so cute though.

Rodney Brooks, the former director of MIT CSAIL, is the founder and CTO of Roomba, Rethink Robotics, and Robust.AI.

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.

Thank you fellow HN member :)

I really like this concept. We distracted by some notifications, but they are not always important at that moment.

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

I've had a pleasant email interaction with the folks behind the Plum Village app, a meditation app from the group of Thich Nhat Hanh. I asked them about how to combine mindfullness with computer usage.

They pointed me to:

https://plumvillage.app/the-social-dilemma-how-bad-is-social...

https://mindful.technology/mindful-web-design/

https://ethical.net/

https://community.humanetech.com/

Hopefully this is helpful to someone who's interested in calm tech.

I don’t trust ethical.net because the kind of people who think that ghastly corporate cubist art is aesthetically acceptable are typically very morally misguided.

I've never seen (or heard I guess) a kettle with a status alarm. They tend to be pretty loud when they're on, you know the water is boiled because they actually do the opposite of an alarm, the sound of boiling water gets quieter.

Maybe thats not calm tech because it requires me to listen out for it, but its simple enough and does the job

Have you used a whistling tea kettle? I think that's what they're referring to -- there's a small opening in the lid or spout of the kettle, and when enough steam pressure builds up inside, the steam forces itself through the opening and makes a loud whistling sound.

I've only ever seen them in cartoons, didn't even clock they were a real thing until I read that

They are real and common and good, but I don’t consider the sound they make all that calming.

I use an insta hot dispenser to make tea. Virtually silent hot water on demand. That seems calmer to me.

Brit here. When I was young whistling kettles were common - partly because they didn't have an auto-off-capability . If you ignored the whistle they boiled themselves dry and the room filled with steam.

I haven't seen (heard) one for years now; can't remember the last time in fact.

Interesting. The kettle on my stove was bought at Walmart and has an intentionally designed whistle about as subtle as a locomotive. I hadn't thought of them has especially rare.

Definitely not "Calm", but unique:

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

https://musicalteakettle.com/

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. [...]

Yeh Im British as well, I guess they're just before my time

They're still pretty common in some parts of the world, particularly ones where gas stoves are ubiquitous. I haven't seen an electric kettle with a whistle, because it doesn't make much sense - if you have an on/of switch, you can also make auto-shutoff - but with stove-heated kettles, there's no on/off switch, hence the need for a loud boiling indicator.

Some of the examples are questionable IMO.

Jawbone up - stopped working because the company went out of business. Technology you can’t actually control by yourself isn’t calm.

Roomba - phones home, requires an app for automatic functionality, automatic functionality stops working eventually if you take away its ability to phone home. Once again, a device that you don’t actually control isn’t calm.

As a corollary to this, any technology which requires an app to function isn’t calm.

My interpretation of the descriptions in the list was not that the author was endorsing the entire product/company, but describing a particular feature or aspect of a product that illustrated calm technology principles. The Roomba's chirps are a good illustration of calm technology even if its telemetry is problematic.

If the threshold for examples is that every aspect of the product must be designed well, require minimal user attention, respect privacy, fully controlled by the end user, and does not require a companion app then the list would be significantly shorter and probably less informative. (I'd struggle to come up with any well-known digital products that fit the bill.)

Never had a Roomba but Botvac works without phoning home or connecting to a network.

Somewhat off-topic but because it's mentioned on the site: I would love to have something like the Jawbone Up today.

Just a bracelet which silently tracks my health. No smart watch, nothing with another display and whatnot. Is there anything out there like the Jawbone?

oura ring is somewhat similar https://ouraring.com/pre-order

Hm, rings are not so much my style, but it's an interesting concept

https://joinzoe.com/ - track blood sugar levels to learn your biological responses to certain food

https://plumelabs.com/ - track your exposure to pollutants

Wow, never thought about constantly tracking my blood sugar levels. Interesting idea probably.

https://www.whoop.com

Hm... This is pretty much what I'm looking for but I don't like the subscription model that much. It's getting somewhat expensiv, compared to what the Jawbone cost.

IX. Technology should never betray its owner or reveal their secrets, to maximize trust.

A technology should always do what the owner wants, even if it is illegal. The technology is an extension of the owner, not a judge.

The ultimate calm phone technology for me was the simple LED indicator on my original Android phone, a nice soft green that would blink when you had a new message. No BING or RING, just a simple indicator that something needs your attention when you want to get around to it. Ahhh I miss that little LED. Now I have to put my device into do not disturb which is TOO quiet and I forget for hours to check it.

At least on iOS there is the option to use the flash LED for alerts: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210065

Technology should work in a predictable way, no IA

User shall always be able to postpone unsolicited interaction

User shall always be offered the choice to ignore future notifications of a given kind

UI shall provide a way to undo any action and never ask for confirmation

UI shall never use drag and drop nor gestures

UI look may change between versions but not widget placement and behavior

Search shall be able to read user's mind

For those who haven't seen it, Marc Weiser's seminal work on Calm Tech is still very much relevant today: https://www.karlstechnology.com/blog/designing-calm-technolo...

I think this is part of the attraction of text-mode user interfaces, as well. Such as vi/nano etc. Or even 'top' and related programs.

It 'requires the smallest possible amount of attention' for the task of editing or writing words, or watching CPU and other information about the state of your system.

Is that in line with what Ivan Illich coined "convival technology"?

Not being encroaching would be a nice to begin with.

This are spot on. People should also apply these principals to their political philosophies. Everyone wants to burden others with their ideas.

“A person's primary task should not be computing, but being human.”

“Give people what they need to solve their problem, and nothing more.”

> If a technology works well, we can ignore it most of the time.

This, a thousand time this, absolutely!

> How many are notifications are necessary?

While I tend to spot such zingers on my first proof-read, I'm quite happy for grammar checkers to give me a nudge on these kinds of mistakes.

I see only two examples on the site of calm tech implemented.

Do they not have a bigger list of products/programs that follow calm tech principals?

Not to be confused with Clam Technology.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLAM_(audio_software)

I absolutely love this! Technology should make us more human by getting out of the way.

Sounds very much like the ideas around attentive user interfaces.

After his untimely death, certain ambitious academics and big industrial companies like IBM have tried to hijack and exploit Mark Weiser's original peaceful, unobtrusive concepts of "Ubiquitous Computing" and "Calm Technology", by rebranding it in-your-face and up-your-yin-yang "Pervasive Computing".

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.

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