麻豆传媒

What do your nightmares look like? If you鈥檙e cyborg anthropologist Amber Case,聽your bad dreams might be a little like Hyper-Reality, the new short film from artist Keiichi Matsuda.

Hyper-Reality is a first-person glimpse into the life of Juliana Restrepo, a woman trying to make ends meet in near-future Colombia. In Matsuda鈥檚 version of the future, ubiquitous augmented reality creates a hyperactive, technicolour world that rolls together the worst of Candy Crush, unending smartphone notifications and relentless billboards.

The surface of everything is screaming for her attention. As she makes her way through town, Juliana 鈥� along with the viewer, who shares her first-person perspective 鈥� is assaulted by incoming messages, flashing alerts and ads, holographic corporate mascots and pleas for ratings, and a digital woman writhing on the edge of her shopping trolley.

We鈥檙e not so far away from that reality, judging by the riotous applications in the works for the internet of things. Think of any household object, and there鈥檚 a good chance that someone out there is figuring out how to soup it up with digital smarts and link it to the internet. Soon, the world will be encrusted in these machines, streaming data back and forth to the cyborgs moving around it. There are two possible futures, one of which is going to give you a headache.

That鈥檚 what Case is worried about, and it鈥檚 why her new book, Calm Technology: Principles and Patterns for Non-Intrusive Design, calls for designers to create what she calls 鈥渃alm technology鈥�.

Tech all over

Over the decades, computers have shrunk and multiplied. Computing power that once required giant machines taking up whole rooms can now fit comfortably into an Apple watch. By 1996, Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown, scientists at Xerox PARC in Palo Alto, California, had anticipated the shift, predicting that soon these small computers would be all around us 鈥� a phenomenon they described as ubiquitous computing.

In a , Weiser and Brown wrote that 鈥渋f computers are everywhere they better stay out of the way鈥�. Their warning was prescient: as we have accumulated ever more personal devices at an increasingly fast rate, their requests for our attention have multiplied. Now there鈥檚 a good chance that your screens 鈥� your smartwatch, your phone, your browser tabs 鈥� are pregnant with at least four unread notifications.

In other words, we still haven鈥檛 figured out how to get our computers out of the way.

It鈥檚 a tragedy of the commons. And as our screens extrude into the world聽around us, thanks to the internet of things and augmented reality, Hyper-Reality provides a warning about how things聽will become: needy; loud; chaotic. 鈥淚t鈥檚 kind of like [comic strip] The Family Circus, except all of your objects are now children and they鈥檙e shouting at you,鈥� says Case.

These fancy computerised replacements threaten to overcomplicate the tiniest details of life. Imagine a fridge or an AI-studded fruit bowl that texts you when one of your bananas is rotting. That might sound nice, but Case points out that a banana already comes with a custom technology that lets you know it鈥檚 going bad: 鈥淚t鈥檚 a peel,鈥� she says. It doesn鈥檛 need batteries, its software is always up to date, and it can鈥檛 be hacked.

This kind of needless overcomplication threatens to make the internet of things into a house of horrors.

鈥淵ou shouldn鈥檛 have to be a systems administrator to live in your own home,鈥� says Case. The future implications of this connected dystopia are evident every time someone complains online that they can鈥檛 log into Google Calendar on their smart fridge, or a hacker manages to leak live images from a baby monitor.

Breaking the dystopia

There鈥檚 a way to avoid this dystopia, though: start making 鈥渃alm technology鈥�, says Case. 鈥淚f good design allows someone to get to their goal with the fewest steps,鈥滳ase writes, 鈥淐alm Technology allows them to get there with the lowest mental cost.鈥�

The ideal calm tech is like electricity: it works, is easy to access when you need it, and is able to disappear into the background so you can focus on more important things. It doesn鈥檛 needlessly drain our energy and attention. 鈥淎 person鈥檚 primary task should not be computing, but being human,鈥� she says.

Much of Case鈥檚 approach focuses on moving technology away from being the centre of our attention to the periphery, where people can keep tabs on important details without becoming overwhelmed by them. Think, for example, of the dashboard light that reminds you to fill your car with petrol, or the whistle of a kettle when tea is ready.

Rather than force someone to focus all their attention on a screen to find out what鈥檚 going on, she suggests communicating through simple sounds or colours, or even touch. A coloured light bulb could give you weather information at a glance. A haptic buzz from the map on your phone might let you know whether to take the next left or right.

Many new devices are eager to speak to their human owners 鈥� but unless they are providing crucial information, such as directions from a satnav, maybe they should be seen and not heard. In many cases, she suggests replacing voice with something less complicated, like the tone of the Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner to show it鈥檚 finished the job.

Another rule is that calm technology should respect social norms. This was a major reason why Google Glass failed, says Case, with too many new features introduced at once rather than being rolled out at a pace the public could handle. It also lacked any obvious indicators of whether the wearer was recording video, breeding mistrust in the many people who didn鈥檛 want to be captured on film by strangers.

Neither will those social norms be one-size-fits-all, says Genevieve Bell, an anthropologist at Intel. But she thinks the broader value of calmness may prove important across cultures.

鈥淲e鈥檙e entering this moment where it鈥檚 less about interaction and more about relationships,鈥� says Bell. 鈥淲hat are we going to do to ensure that all computers don鈥檛 feel incredibly aggravating and burdensome?鈥�

A calmer world

While we wait for the tech world to catch up with the philosophy of Case, Weiser and Brown, there are things we can do to make things聽calmer.

Time Well Spent, a design community that rails against the slide towards ever more distracting software, offers a list of tips for smartphone users that encourages them to make 鈥渕indful鈥� choices: for example, hiding distracting apps from the phone鈥檚 first page or putting them in separate folders; turning off all notifications from businesses or machines; and not unlocking your phone when the alarm goes off in the morning 鈥� or, better yet, buying a second alarm clock so that you鈥檙e not tempted to browse in bed.

The foremost rule is to respect what a single person鈥檚 attention can handle. 鈥淭hough technology might not have a limit, we do,鈥� says Case.