They say that the best acting is acting that doesn’t feel like acting. The same is true of technology: the best technology is technology that doesn’t feel like technology. Our goal as designers and engineers is not impressive technology, it's invisible technology. That’s why revisiting a 1995 article about calm design principles was a breath of fresh air for me.
Rewind to the early 1990s, when I was an electrical engineering student. I remember reading about this Xerox internet string display built by the artist Natalie Jeremijenko. It was a clever way to visualize network traffic in the real physical world. The more data that passed through the network, the faster the string would move. A quiet network barely moved the string. Heavy traffic set it whirling. Flashing lights would have been another way to communicate the throughput, but the string was a clever and tactile way to convey it too. The string was an example from the Xerox PARC engineers Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown who first described the idea of “calm technology”.
The idea behind calm technology (in my words) is not to remove technology, but to make the tech invisible, or seamless and behind the scenes. In this way people (users) in the real world get the benefits of complex technology, ideally while not even foreground conscious of the technology itself. The idea even extending to creating technology that fails gracefully and thoughtfully. As a designer, creating calm technology systems is a lot of work, because the gravitational pull is always towards complexity and towards obnoxiousness.
In short, we as designers and engineers should aim for invisible technology, not impressive technology.
Take the fountain in front of my house as one example. It was a lot of work for my wife and I to design and install it. Much of the magic happens below ground level. We dug out a water reservoir pit that’s surprisingly deep, lined the pit with waterproof membrane, and installed invisible supports. This underground compartment is where the submerged pump and tubing and wiring all hide under the rocks. There’s also digital controls for flow and lighting, and even chemistry at work to keep the algae away. We even had to replace the original vintage ceramic elements with cast replicas that could withstand Midwestern winters without cracking apart.
Anyone who walks by our fountain, they just see and hear water and maybe enjoy the aesthetic, never thinking about all of the technology beneath the surface that’s making it happen. The best technology system designs achieve this ideal, where the technology is invisible, and in service of the user experience.
All this is easier to achieve in a fountain than in my day job at Engenious Design creating medical devices. But the principles translate if we work at it.
We’ve all been in a hospital room where the beeps and alarms and flashing lights are anything but calm. That’s a design fail. A challenging part of medical device design is achieving meaningful alarms, clear outputs, while remaining as calm as possible. Some situations are necessarily not calm, but our ideals as designers here at Engenious are to make the experience as calm as possible. And to fail gracefully; meaning deal with alarm situations in the most thoughtful way.
Need help making complex medical technology feel simple? Contact our team at Engenious Design.
Archive of the original Weiser and Brown article: https://calmtech.com/papers/designing-calm-technology
