Better Tech: Why We Need Calm Technology Now More Than Ever
By Caroline Sinders

April 27, 2020

Better Tech: Why We Need Calm Technology Now More Than Ever

You’ve interacted with Calm Technology even if you don’t know what it is. It’s exactly what it sounds like: a decades-old design framework that advocates for ethical technology. It asks that technology be usable, safe, and simple. It asks that it should be calm, non-intrusive, and allow for maintenance, too.

Calm Technology isn’t a new idea. It was created by two researchers in 1995 from the renowned technology research lab in Silicon Valley called Xerox Parc (yes, Xerox the copy-maker; they did a bunch of interesting stuff back in the day!).

In 2015, the researcher and futurist Amber Case wrote a book that took a concept developed almost 30 years ago and resituated it for the right-now. Her book, Calm Technology, built off the methodology developed at Xerox Parc in 1995 but contextualized it within our current interconnected world of networked devices and the internet of things.

During global and tech solutionism in 2020, the principles of Calm Technology have never been more important. It shouldn’t be jarring or invasive. Perhaps a good way to understand what it is is to think about what it is not. Surveillance cameras are not Calm Technology since users have no real agency or control over them.

Alexa is not Calm Technology, as designer Daniel Harvey shared with me in an interview. Alexa’s “false activations and poor voice recognition” and general misunderstandings (not to mention it’s lack of data privacy) make it a ‘not’ Calm Technology, Harvey said.

Calm Technology may not seem revolutionary, but when it was conceived of in 1995, it was #

John Seely Brown and Mark Weiser conceptualized first the internet of things, taking seriously “the belief that soon we will have hundreds if not thousands of computers surrounding each of us” but then wanted to focus that belief in on the user. The idea that so much information and technology would be surrounding us should not overwhelm the user.

Seely Brown describes this in an updated introduction to the paper:

_“..now start to consider how to move from user-centered design and the design of affordances to user-centering design, design that keeps us feeling located in the maelstrom. The key is to honor, if not amplify, the interplay between content and context or the interplay between center and periphery...our goal, nudges us to incorporate the periphery, amplifying how we can attune to it without having to consciously interpret it and thus creating a sense of calmness.” _

As calm technology comes more into users' lives, how it alerts users and the invasiveness of the technology needs to be heavily considered and reduced. It offers a glimpse of the world that is less whirring and beeping, and constantly measuring everything, and is a lot quieter. If anything, it’s thinking about all users' daily lives, and how interruptive technology can be—when it alerts, when it functions, and when it fails.

Aspects of Calm Technology are rising in popularity due to Covid-19, like the programming language COBOL. The programming language is having a resurgence in popularity, as we see with the New Jersey Governor asking for COBOL programmers to help program their unemployment program. Its popularity is due to the fact that a lot of government infrastructure is written in COBOL, since these programs were written decades ago.

Over a messaging app, Case shared a few thoughts on the beauty of COBOL and maintenance. Many Twitter users expressed surprise over COBOL, often considered an ancient programming language, still being used. But it’s a low level, reliable language, Case emphasized, and the reliability is what makes it calm tech. Case wonders what if COBOL had an enthusiastic community around it, like Ham Radio operators which have new, growing numbers of maintainers, then would it seem so strange to update and use this language currently? Often we forget that infrastructure, programming languages, technology, and electricity itself are forms of innovation. This kind of innovation actually falls under the "Calm Technology" umbrella.

Case wrote in our interview, “I think of good code like electricity... But most of the time it works, and it has to. We operate it with a switch. A specialist with training is the one qualified to change it. Yes, it can be upgraded. And it should be! But fundamentally it’s all the same stuff. I’d rather have my code run like electricity than some IoT cloud device system that accidentally sets off a fire alarm. COBOL is complicated for a reason. It’s super low level abstract. It’s fine that it’s difficult to write.”

Reliability at the scale of something like COBOL is what makes it Calm Technology—it’s knowing that it won’t break (as much) that shifts COBOL and Calm Technology away from current technology and design frameworks.

It’s not "move fast and break things." It’s moving slowly and building things sustainably.

Where Calm Technology can lead us next #

We need to revisit the principles of Calm Technology, especially as governments and companies are trying to build so many things, quickly, and using this time to further surveillance into products. In order to solve problems during a crisis—and a crisis of a global scale—care is key. So are minimalism, user privacy, and simplicity. Things built quickly, that can fail or break, or aren’t thinking of harm reduction (or are just... tracking everyone and all data) are problematic technology, definitively not Calm Technology. Here are two principles by Case that feel particularly pertinent to this time, during the Covid-19 pandemic:

Principle 6: Technology should work even when it fails

_Illustration by Emily Griffin_.