Calm Technology

Preface

I FIRST CAME ACROSS Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown’s work “Designing Calm Technology” in 2005. I was a sophomore in college at the time, and although technology was a passion of mine, my coursework and research were primarily in anthropology—I didn’t yet know how tightly linked the two disciplines actually were. I was just beginning to discover how important an understanding of human behavior was to the design of technology, and specifically, the ways we communicate with our devices.

In 2005, smartphones were just entering the landscape, transforming the humble mobile phone from a glorified walkie-talkie into a fully functioning computer that would take all of the challenges of computer user interfaces and amplify them in our daily lives. It was this research that led me to eventually write my thesis on smartphones and their impact on human culture. During my research I stumbled upon a little-known but breakthrough paper in human–computer interaction from the mid-’90s called “Designing Calm Technology.” It turned out that researchers at Xerox PARC, including technologists and anthropologists from a variety of backgrounds, had been working for years on understanding the impact of technology on people’s behavior and well-being.

Their chief concern was how to best design technologies for a future saturated with small devices. I realized that the subject of Calm Technology and the research underlying it were not just about where the Internet was headed, but where our entire ...