Designing In Calm Technology: Calamity Requirements as Defined by Weiser

Mark Weiser defines Calm technology as a technology that induces calamity and comfort as part of the usage experience, and argue about several key issues that characterizes it. We have based ourselves upon these issues to define a set of preliminary requirements for calamity and comfort that cultivates a preliminary approach to the design of calm information systems. The following requirements address only the general aspects of calm information systems although case-specific requirements might also prove to be vital in certain settings such as Computer Supported Collaborative Environments, but this will be discussed in a later stage.

According to Weiser, these are the main requirements for calamity and comfort in information systems:

• Unobtrusiveness: The system should not interfere in any external user activity nor bother it.
• Engaging Peripheral and Central Attention: emulating the way humans use peripheral attention around central attention by making the move from peripheral to central and visa versa easy. This also requires special attention to affordances in the periphery.
• Provision of context and rich informative settings: people prefer to have lots of information without being innodated by it. The context of information sets gives users more power to handle their content, while rich information settings also induces the feeling of control. The periphery can be used to attune to much more information than a user can place in his/her center of attention.

We also add a couple of requirements that we find essential in the scenario of information processing and consumption:

• Clarity of information: centers on the user of the right surrogates and representational processes. Surrogates must be chosen to be as expressive as possible when maintaining low cognitive requirements. In the periphery, the maintenance of low cognitive requirements is more critical that the high degree of visibility by which information can be understood from the surrogates that represent it.
  
• Ontological specifications: Calm technology information systems should thrive to render the inherent ontology related to the structure and relationships among units of information visible. The ontology adopted by the information system should neither contradict the user ontological model, nor become a universal ontology. In short, matters of ontological concerns should reflect the user´s understanding and methodological thinking when projected onto the information spaces.

These five requirements form the general fundamental properties of calm information systems or more generally, calm technology. Weiser says that technology encalms when it empowers our periphery. Such statement may have large consequences to what concerns the design and implementation of information visualization schemes and interactive informative systems.

[Reference]: Mark Weiser and John Brown. Designing Calm Technology. Xerox PARC. 1995