Mark Weiser - Ubiquitous Computing and Calm Technology

Ubiquitous Computing and Calm Technology

Ubiquitous computing names the third wave in computing, just now beginning. First were mainframes, each shared by lots of people. Now we are in the personal computing era, person and machine staring uneasily at each other across the desktop. Next comes ubiquitous computing, or the age of calm technology, when technology recedes into the background of our lives.

—Mark Weiser

During one of his talks, Weiser outlined a set of principles describing ubiquitous computing:

  • The purpose of a computer is to help you do something else.
  • The best computer is a quiet, invisible servant.
  • The more you can do by intuition the smarter you are; the computer should extend your unconscious.
  • Technology should create calm.

In Designing Calm Technology, Weiser and John Seely Brown describe calm technology as "that which informs but doesn't demand our focus or attention."

Read more about this topic:  Mark Weiser

Famous quotes containing the words calm and/or technology:

    There was calm rapture in the way she spoke
    Perhaps I would get over the way the joke
    Always turned against me, in the end.
    John Ashbery (b. 1927)

    One can prove or refute anything at all with words. Soon people will perfect language technology to such an extent that they’ll be proving with mathematical precision that twice two is seven.
    Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)