Calm Technology, Ubicomp, and Manufactured Normalcy Field
Technology’s Drivers and Information
Technology’s greatest drivers have initially been fundamental needs, such as food, water, warmth, safety, and health. Hunting and foraging, fire, building and fortifications, and medicine grow out of these needs. Because resources for these things are not always distributed where and when one might like, technological advances progress with enabling and controlling the movement of people, their possessions, livestock, and other resources.
Information becomes key, too—hence, the development of language to communicate technology to others. Travelers might pass on messages as well as goods and services, and an oral tradition allows this information to pass through time as well as space.
High-end cars may communicate their location back to a tracking service for insurance and anti-theft purposes. The wealth of programming and debugging resources available for these platforms has made them attractive to hobbyists and the prototyping market, leading to the proliferation of microcontrollers. For situations in which a fixed network connection isn’t readily available, mobile phone connectivity is widespread.
Calm and Ambient Technology
Concerned with what happens when computing power becomes cheap enough that it can be embedded into all manner of everyday objects, Mark Weiser coined the term ubiquitous computing, or ubicomp for short.
With its focus on computing power being embedded everywhere, ubicomp is often also referred to as ambient computing. However, the term “ambient” also has connotations of being merely in the background, not something to which we actively pay attention and in some cases as something which we seek to remove (e.g., ambient noise in a sound recording).
Calm technology refers to systems which don’t vie for attention yet are ready to provide utility or useful information when we decide to give them some attention.
The mention of the distinctive sound from the motor when the Live Wire is under heavy load brings up another interesting point. Moving the means of conveying information away from screens and into the real world often adds a new dimension to the notification. On a computer, updating the screen is purely visual, so any additional senses must be engaged explicitly.
Like Live Wire, Bubblino—Adrian’s Internet of Things bubble machine which searches Twitter and blows bubbles when it finds new tweets matching a search phrase—is a good example in which the side effect of the motor is to generate an audible notification that something is happening.
Manufactured Normalcy Field
We don’t see the present, the world that we live in now, as something that is changing. If we step back for a second, we do know that it has changed, although the big advances sneak up on us over time, hidden in plain sight. This is the concept of the manufactured normalcy field.
For a technology to be adopted, it has to make its way inside the manufactured normalcy field. As a result, the successful user-experience designer is the one who presents users with an experience which doesn’t stretch the boundaries of their particular normalcy field too far, even if the underlying technology being employed is a huge leap ahead of the norm.
For example, the mobile phone was first introduced as a phone that wasn’t tethered to a particular location. Now broadly the same technology is used to provide a portable Internet terminal, which can play movies, carry your entire music collection, and (every now and then) make phone calls.