Do you miss the feel of tactile buttons on your kitchen appliances or lament car manufacturers’ insistence on touchscreens? Have you ever found yourself clumsily fumbling with the door handles of a vehicle or distracted by the bright blue light beaming from your vacuum or Wi-Fi router?
If so, you’re not alone. The way technology gadgets are designed largely relies on things like blue, often LED, lights, flat resistive or capacitive touch input, and software. Some, like Amber Case, founder of the Calm Tech Institute, believe that these design choices distract from devices’ purpose and functionality and are calling for a new approach to product design.
“Calm Tech Institute is kind of a consumer advocacy body that’s collecting stories and research from neuroscientists that says, look at how the mind wants texture, and look at how it wants physical buttons, and there’s a part of your mind that needs [those],” Case told Ars Technica. “When we don’t have it and we replace it with glass, we’re not only losing something about human experience, but we’re actually causing the mind stress.”
The Calm Tech Institute, founded in May 2024, provides workshops, speaking engagements, and certification for products that “enhance human life without causing stress or distraction,” its website says.
Speaking to Ars, Case pointed to user frustrations, such as software updates hindering car usage and “Why is there no button on the back of the television when I go into the hotel room late at night, and I have to turn on my flashlight on my iPhone to find the button to turn it off?” These experiences are the antithesis of the Calm Tech philosophy, Case explained:
Once we learn [how to ride a bike], we never have to learn it again. Whereas, with how a lot of software … and physical objects are made now, you have to relearn it. It gets changed or the buttons aren’t in the right place, and you can feel your mind wanting the button to be in a certain place. And it’s not.
What makes a gadget calm?
The Calm Tech Institute takes inspiration from papers that Mark D. Weiser wrote while CTO at Xerox Palo Alto Research Company (PARC), an R&D firm now known as SRI International’s PARC. Weiser is often remembered as the father of ubiquitous computing, which starkly differs from technology approaches that submerge people in technology, like the metaverse. By contrast, ubiquitous computing products blend more discreetly into user environments. Per a quote from Weiser on Calm Tech Institute’s website: “Ubiquitous computing is roughly the opposite of virtual reality. Where virtual reality puts people inside a computer-generated world, ubiquitous computing forces the computer to live out here in the world with people.”
