Calm Technology, human-centered design, social design, and anthropology

Principles to Design Technology that Becomes Part of User’s Life and not a Distraction From It

Calm Technology, a method of smoothly capturing a user’s attention only when necessary, while calmly remaining in the background most of the time.

Photo by Marvin Meyer on Unsplash

Attention is the concentration of the mind on a single object or thought, especially one preferentially selected from a complex, with a view to limiting or clarifying receptivity by narrowing the range of stimuli. There is one fundamental truth that demands us to take a new approach to technology it’s the number of alerts which is taking our attention has increased. There is a limited bandwidth for our attention within which all our activity has to be performed. The information technology around us requires as much attention as our current technologies.

The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.

We are seeing a large amount of information in every aspect of our lives. The data is no longer something that we encounter at work alone. It has become…