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.<p>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.<p>Sorry, not really a point in this comment but it felt significant to the point of the website.
Reminds me of these desiderata from an essay by Wendell Berry:<p>-----------<p>To make myself as plain as I can, I should give my standards for technological innovation in my own work. They are as follows:<p>1. The new tool should be cheaper than the one it replaces.
2. It should be at least as small in scale as the one it replaces.
3. It should do work that is clearly and demonstrably better than the one it replaces.
4. It should use less energy than the one it replaces.
5. If possible, it should use some form of solar energy, such as that of the body.
6. It should be repairable by a person of ordinary intelligence, provided that he or she has the necessary tools.
7. It should be purchasable and repairable as near to home as possible.
8. It should come from a small, privately owned shop or store that will take it back for maintenance and repair.
9. It should not replace or disrupt anything good that already exists, and this includes family and community relationships.
I'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.<p>Seems to have a lot of overlap with these principles.
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.<p>I'm afraid that there will always be an underwhelming minority of technology users who make conscious choices to purchase and encourage calm technology.<p>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.
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 <i>even worse</i>- how technology interacts with <i>non-users</i>.<p>Unless we're shut up in our own private rooms (and often enough, even then) we're all constantly getting the "Status Shouts" of devices completely unrelated to us. Is a truck down the street from your window set in reverse? You'll know. Did someone down the hall leave their cellphone unattended on their desk? You'll find out if they get a call. Goodness forbid that you share a building with someone who doesn't change the batteries in their smoke alarms! All of these are okay design decisions when considering one device and one human user, but in an environment where there can dozens of humans and thousands of devices in a city block, they become drastically less apt.
I wholeheartedly agree.<p>It is a bit like Unix principles (please, don't hit me!) - if program succeeded it should not output anything by default.<p><pre><code> $ cp foo bar
$
</code></pre>
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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 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.<p>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.<p>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<p>If this is true, then "tools for thought" can never be "calm technology," since creative thinking is not just about problem solving, but problem <i>finding</i>.<p>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).<p>> How many are notifications are necessary?<p>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.
Not sure about this website, but the original essay by Mark Weiser should be required reading for HN crowd IMO:<p><a href="http://homes.di.unimi.it/~boccignone/GiuseppeBoccignone_webpage/IUM2_files/weiser-calm.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://homes.di.unimi.it/~boccignone/GiuseppeBoccignone_webp...</a>
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.
I've been on this website many times and read the book. I long for the day everyone follows these principles.<p>"Technology should amplify the best of technology and the best of humanity".