{"id":148,"date":"2001-04-18T10:10:00","date_gmt":"2001-04-18T18:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.netjeff.com\/wp\/?p=148"},"modified":"2007-12-30T23:41:54","modified_gmt":"2007-12-31T07:41:54","slug":"the-coming-age-of-calm-technology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.netjeff.com\/wp\/?p=148","title":{"rendered":"The coming age of calm technology"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> Mark Weiser and John Brown of Xerox PARC wrote <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ubiq.com\/hypertext\/weiser\/acmfuture2endnote.htm\">this article in October 1996<\/a> about a new approach to technology they dub \"calm technology\".<\/p>\n<p>The article starts off with an introduction to the four phases of computing: mainframe, PC, internet\/distributed, and ubiquitous computing (UC). If you're not familiar, UC is the idea that computers will become so prevalent, they will disappear into the background just like electricity has. The authors summarize it like this: The UC era will have lots of computers sharing us.<\/p>\n<p>But the interesting parts are their ideas on \"calm technology\" and their ideas on periphery and center:<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p style=\"margin-left: 2em\">The most potentially interesting, challenging, and profound change implied by the ubiquitous computing era is a focus on <em>calm<\/em>. If computers are everywhere they better stay out of the way, and that means designing them so that the people being shared by the computers remain serene and in control. Calmness is a new challenge that UC brings to computing. [&#8230;] when computers are all around, so that we want to compute while doing something else and have more time to be more fully human, we must radically rethink the goals, context and technology of the computer and all the other technology crowding into our lives. Calmness is a fundamental challenge for all technological design of the next fifty years.<\/p>\n<p>[&#8230;] Calm technology engages both the <em>center<\/em> and the <em>periphery <\/em>of our attention, and in fact moves back and forth between the two. [&#8230;] We use \"periphery\" to name what we are attuned to without attending to explicitly.<\/p>\n<p>What is in the periphery at one moment may in the next moment come to be at the center of our attention and so be crucial. The same physical form may even have elements in both the center and periphery. The ink that communicates the central words of a text also peripherally clues us into the genre of the text though choice of font and layout.<\/p>\n<p>A calm technology will move easily from the periphery of our attention, to the center, and back. This is fundamentally encalming, for two reasons.<\/p>\n<p>First, by placing things in the periphery we are able to attune to many more things than we could if everything had to be at the center. Things in the periphery are attuned to by the large portion of our brains devoted to peripheral (sensory) processing. Thus the periphery is informing without overburdening.<\/p>\n<p>Second, by recentering something formerly in the periphery we take control of it. Peripherally we may become aware that something is not quite right, as when awkward sentences leave a reader tired and discomforted without knowing why. By moving sentence construction from periphery to center we are empowered to act, either by finding better literature or accepting the source of the unease and continuing. Without centering the periphery might be a source of frantic following of fashion; with centering the periphery is a fundamental enabler of calm through increased awareness and power.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mark Weiser and John Brown of Xerox PARC wrote this article in October 1996 about a new approach to technology they dub \"calm technology\". The article starts off with an introduction to the four phases of computing: mainframe, PC, internet\/distributed, and ubiquitous computing (UC). If <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.netjeff.com\/wp\/?p=148\">Read More &#8230;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-148","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.netjeff.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.netjeff.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.netjeff.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.netjeff.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.netjeff.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=148"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.netjeff.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.netjeff.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.netjeff.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.netjeff.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}