Technology — is it asking too much of us?

By Christian Stöckmann

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Has technology overstepped its welcome? Too often, new products and services are spending too much time putting themselves at the centre of our focus, bombarding us with new features, synchronising across devices and auto-scheduling software updates. All the while, they are pushing incessant notifications that demand our oversight and approval. It can feel as if the tool is better at taking up our attention than at doing the task it was actually intended for.

How is this constant need for attention affecting our experience of new products or services? At best, it’s a necessary administrative burden, but at worst it’s an attention-seeking parasite taking away our freedom as humans to ‘be human’.

In the mid-90s, researchers at Xerox PARC in Palo Alto anticipated the explosion in the number of digital devices we would come to use. They coined the phrase ‘ubiquitous computing’ as a way of describing how technology would percolate into every part of our lives. Acutely aware of the cost that may come with it, they created the principles of ‘Calm technology’ as an attempt to guide this growth connectivity. They advised that technology would need to evolve to take up less of our attention, fade into the background and only interrupt us if absolutely necessary, at the right time and with awareness of the context.

“In the twenty-first century the technology revolution will move into the everyday, the small and the invisible. The impact of technology will increase ten-fold as it is imbedded in the fabric of everyday life. As technology becomes more imbedded and invisible, it calms our lives by removing annoyances while keeping us connected with what is truly important.”

Calm Technology and Pervasive Connectivity, Mark D. Weiser, 1999

Calm technology was based on the principle that good technology should be able to move between your periphery and your centre of attention, but only when necessary.

Whilst big technology firms have introduced wellbeing features to help encourage people to reduce their time spent using technology, such as Google’s digital wellbeing commitment which is a good first step, there is much more to be done when you consider the plethora of digital products, devices and services that are out there.

The digital utopia shown in glossy ads where devices integrate seamlessly into our schedules, automating the mundane and freeing us up to live our lives more productively, misrepresent a reality where technology relies entirely on our engagement, time and attention to keep it going.

More foreground than the periphery?

Many digital products which stayed on the periphery of our attention for years are now spending far more time at the centre. We have given these products and services direct and unfettered access to our attention. Most require a smartphone to function, meaning they can ping you at any time — it’s no longer just unsolicited cold calls that break our focus anymore (now even your flip flops can send you a great special deal).

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Things that we didn’t even realise we needed to think about are now being pressed directly into the palm of our hand to keep us hooked: all for the pursuit of profit and customer loyalty. Some argue that advances in technology are reducing our attention span and distracting us from the present. Worryingly, this distraction — when we are taken away from the moment — has been proven in a study to negatively affect our ability to be happy.

Fear of failure and obsolescence

Many new digital products and devices, especially those targeted at making your home more connected, create underlying and low-level anxiety. It starts when we buy it — there is so much choice, but have you made the right decision? Is it going to remain compatible with your other products and services? Is this the platform you want to ‘invest’ in? Will it become obsolete? Is it working right now?

It continues as we start to use the product: checking on the nappy sensor to make sure your children are sleeping soundly; checking in on your home whilst you’re away on holiday or checking your phone at work to make sure your plumbing hasn’t sprung a leak. All of these things are possible with connected devices, and whilst for some these might be incredibly helpful, for the most part we are giving technology too much access and license to distract us.

And when it does fail, it does so catastrophically. Amber Case, who is credited with keeping the research at Xerox Parc alive, gives an example where an IoT pet feeder’s servers went offline and people who were far from home, on holiday even, were unable to feed their pets — they had relied on a service for a critical task that hadn’t designed for failure.

So why aren’t we designing CALM technology?

Since the researchers at Xerox PARC came up with Calm technology 20 years ago, ‘engagement’ has become the key metric for huge swathes of digital products. Engagement is, for the most part, a lever to drive revenue; the more time people spend ‘engaged’ with digital and connected products, the more opportunity businesses have to sell their goods, services and ads. Designers are often tasked with creating products that, amongst other things, distract users’ attention, create habitual behaviours, and perhaps most worryingly of all, form long-lasting addictions. Unsurprisingly, many of the principles of Calm technology go against this.

How can we incentivise technology firms to consider products in the context of our lives? Do we need to reshape our business models to adopt calm technology? Can we find a way of monetising the lack of engagement with a product?

Our responsibility as designers and technologists

It’s easy to say as a designer, if it doesn’t solve the problem, we shouldn’t do it. But that isn’t realistic. I do think there are some questions we should be keeping front of mind, when we build a product or service, to make sure we are doing what we can, to make sure technology fades into the background:

1. Lives are messy. How does our product or service fit into the mess?
2. What impact does the failure of this product or service have on our users?
3. Should we be discussing digital fatigue as a matter of course in all research and testing?
4. What is the minimum burden we can place on someone, yet still solve a problem?
5. Can the default communication with users from the product or service, be set to the minimum?
6. What is the long-term impact of doing what we are doing on peoples’ ability to be human?
7. How do we communicate calm technology to a business that has other motivations?
8. Can we measure on reduction in engagement, instead?

There is no denying that technology is, and will, continue to significantly improve our lives, but perhaps now is the time to listen to the predictions from the 1990s and correct course, before it tips towards destruction.

By Christian Stöckmann — Experience Designer, Deloitte Digital