Your phone buzzed while you were reading this sentence. That buzz was a design decision — someone chose to interrupt you. Maybe for a good reason, maybe just to boost engagement metrics. Either way, it was a choice, not an inevitability.
Calm Technology argues it shouldn't have happened at all — or at least not like that. The core question: does this tech need your attention right now, or is it just taking it?
Where It Came From
Coined in 1995 by Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown at Xerox PARC, in a paper called "Designing Calm Technology." Weiser had already been pushing the idea of ubiquitous computing — computers woven invisibly into daily life — and calm technology was its natural companion. If devices were going to be everywhere, they couldn't all demand attention all the time.
Centre vs Periphery
