Case
Cyborg anthropologist studying humans and technology! Attention, UX and physical design. Founder of the Calm Tech Institute.
Former MIT Media Lab, Harvard Berkman and Mozilla Fellow.
calmtech.institute // calmtech.com // cyborganthropology.com
- Interested in Calm Tech? Come to a special edition @metagov.bsky.social seminar on the Neuroscience of Calm on 11 Feb! Free and open. Just sign up below:
- dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/... A new method is presented for performing rapid and accurate numerical estimation.
- It's not what the future *looks* like, but what the future *feels* like.
- One of my favorite little domains is expiring. Rural.io. There's nothing on it now, but for many years I had fun using it as a private blog. If someone wants to buy it off of me, send me a message. .io domains renewals are a little pricier than others and I've been using pikapods now.
- Dear Google Hangouts: Please Fix How Notetaker Bots Join Our Calls! Have you ever been on a work call which looks like this? You’re there to see one individual, but multiple chatbot notetakers have also joined! When a notetaker bot is joined to the Meeting, it’s the same size as a whole person!
- Buildings isolate people more efficiently than villains. Digital buildings follow suit.
- At first, the design feels clean and effortless. But the simplicity is doing more work than it lets on: much of the thinking has quietly been handed to the "user". There's no such thing as automation in a store. When we use self-checkout, we're performing that labor. And poorly, too.
- In the beginning was the CD: material, bounded, complete. From completeness came ownership. From ownership came care. Now we have removed the boundary. The infinite patch, and the endless service.
- The Thirty-Day Baptism Every so often you see it: this practice of "thirty days of code", or "30 days of design", in which a single person determines to build something - anything really - every day for 30 days.
- In woodworking, there is a separate skill called finishing. Sanding, staining, sealing. Multiple coats. Waiting for each to cure. Buffing. These are techniques you must learn and practice. The finishing reveals flaws in the underlying work. You cannot hide poor joinery under polyurethane.
- A chair maker finishes a chair. The chair holds you. It will hold your children. If it breaks, the break is visible. You can see a cracked spindle or a loose joint, and the chair can be repaired because all the information needed to repair it is present in the object itself.
- When new technologies emerge, they conflict with the tech that already exists.
- Excellent news, and what every company should do! Less E-Waste and more joy. Honestly, Bose makes excellent speakers, and allowing all of that engineering to go to waste is a real sad sack. Good on them! #calmtech www.theverge.com/news/858501/...
- The future doesn't come from the front. It comes from the side. People who are stuck looking ahead have trouble seeing it because they're not using peripheral vision.
