C Calm Technologies as the Future Goal of Information Technologies

Calm Technologies as the Future Goal of Information Technologies Alexandru Ţugui Al I. Cuza University, Romania

Everything that surrounds us is technology! Be it or not natural, It influences the environment we live in. Here is a serious reason for every technology to be calm!

IntroductIon The evolution of the human society over the last 50,000 years has been greatly influenced by technology. The last 200 years have brought about technological achievements at a breathtaking speed. For about six decades, we have been the beneficiaries of the information technologies, which have acquired, over the last 20-25 years, due to the communication technology, an exponential proliferation. In an ideal world, computers will blend into the landscape, will inform but not overburden you with information, and make you aware of them only when you need them. Therefore, the human being is a mere subject of technology, and his everyday life has become increasingly stressing. In order to diminish this stress, solutions have been considered, designed to “tame” the technologies that the

human being uses, so as to become calm technologies, that is, technologies that affect neither the human life nor the environment. We can say that everything that surrounds us is technology! Be it or not natural, It influences the environment we live in. Here is a serious reason for every technology to be calm! This article basically deals with the concept of calm technologies and with the characteristics that should be emphasized in the field of the information and communication technologies aimed at turning them into calm technologies.

Is there a law of global calmness? We believe YES! From a distance, any system leaves us with the impression that it is dominated by a global silence. Yet sometimes, there occur phenomena and processes that influence this global silence. We mean, for instance, the occurrence of a supernova in our galaxy (for example, the observations of the Chinese of 1054 A.D. about the appearance of a supernova). We believe that our universe is a calm universe. At its turn, our solar system is a system with a high degree

Figure 1. Galaxies seen from 8 million light years1 (left), and 2 million galaxies2 (right)

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Calm Technologies as the Future Goal of Information Technologies

of calmness, that is, planets have stable routes and are not “absorbed” by their sun and there are “suppliers” of global calmness (we mean the giant planets that draw “intruders” into the system). As for the Earth, seen from space it seems a huge “oasis of calmness,” where almost nothing happens. As we get closer, we see this calmness affected by natural phenomena and processes or by the avalanche of technologies invented by man. Regarding the appearance of life, we think that it appeared there where it was best and favorable for its development, against a background of minimal global calmness. Any perturbation of this minimal calmness leads irreversibly to life damaging. We sustain that life could not have appeared on Earth if this had not made available to it a quiet, calm environment. To this respect, specialists believe that the disappearance of dinosaurs is the result of the clash between Earth and a large body (of about 10 km) that would have led to the troubling of the existing calmness on Earth, with direct effects on the life of that time. We can say that everything that surrounds us is technology! Be it or not natural, It influences the environment we live in. Here is a serious reason for every technology to be calm! Therefore, we all agree that the technologies used by man in day to day life are dangerous, as they overlap with natural processes and phenomena and may influence negatively the minimal conditions to maintain

life. This is why we have to prevent our technologies from disturbing this calmness. Generally speaking, we think that in all systems there is an orientation to a global calmness specific to its own development stage. In other words, we may say that there is a law of global calmness to which any system is directed.

What are calm technologies and Why this technology? By technology, as a restricted meaning, it is understood as a practical scientific application to the purpose of achieving some objectives, especially commercial or industrial ones. In French, technology means the total processes, methods, operations, and so forth, used in order to obtain a product (Romanian Academy [RA], 2003). As a general meaning, by technology, in our opinion, we should understand any process of transformation applied to some resources by the application of some methods, techniques, and procedures, in order to attain certain objectives. It is obvious that any technology carries both advantages and disadvantages for the environment in which it is produced or applied. Therefore, any technology is characterized by a certain technological aggressiveness, that is, the extent to which it affects or does not affect the environment in which it was produced or it was applied.

Figure 2. Earth seen from the cosmos (nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov)


Speaking about the existing technologies, we may make distinctions between aggressive technologies and calm technologies from the viewpoint of the degree in which they affect or not, directly or indirectly, on the spot or in time, locally or globally, the environment in which they were produced or applied. By calm technology, we understand that technology that does not affect life or environment in which (or for which) it produced. An aggressive technology is the technology that is not calm. In order to perpetuate life in the long run, it is necessary to focus increasingly on the calm side of every technology applied, used, or created by man for meeting his needs. The necessity to resort to calm technologies is justified by the short-term implications of the disadvantages specific to any technology. By this study, we do not undertake to exhaustively tackle the disadvantages of a certain technology, but we rather want to tackle the issue of the necessity of the orientation of technologies to the calm side to make things better at a local and at a global level.

about Information technology Definitions At this time, there is no unanimous opinion in defining information technologies; however, the most relevant of them is to understand them as collections of technological fields that develop simultaneously and interdependently. Some of the most important fields are computer science, electronics, and communications. Boar (2001) believes that information technologies enable the preparing, collection, transportation, searching, memorizing, accessing, presenting and transforming the information in any format whatsoever (voice, graphics, text, video and image). These operations may be made by people alone, people and equipment and/or equipment alone. Generally speaking, we may say that the information society can be defined as an information-based society. In a modern meaning, we may speak of an informationbased society since the use of computers in economy, after the building of the ENIAC in 1947, that is, since the second half of the 50s of the last century. We may say that the global information society is plainly the human society in the time of analysis with the informational modernism print specific to the information avalanche.

Waves of Information technologies

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The following years will bring about essential changes in our everyday life. Thus, the use of electronic computers will be extended to all activity fields, due to an increase by almost 100 thousand times of the current performance, until it reaches the performance of the human brain, together with a reduction of its size to the shape of a chip. The name of this computer will be system-on-a-chip, and its price will be so small that its package will be more expensive than the system itself. At the same time, the information and communication technologies, together with the discoveries of new materials, shall lead to the so-called Cyberspace, whose spine will be the INTERNET and the virtuality through digitization. At network level, performance will be amazing. Thus, many types of networks are meant to fulfill people’s dreams about a wholly or partially cyber-based world and about an information superhighway (Eckes & Zeiler, 2003; Josserand, 2004). In other words, the grounds of tomorrow’s society will be constituted by information and computer-mediated communications. Moschella (1995 - as cited in O’Brien, 1999) has drawn up a global information society transition chart and he reckons that humanity, in order to reach that point, must go through four waves, namely: • • • •

Computerized Enterprises, corresponding to the period 1970-2010. Networked KnowledgeWorkers, which started in 1980. Global Internetworked Society, started around 1992-1993. Global Information Society, which will begin after 2010.

As it is presented in Figure 3, until 2010 we will be crossing a period of time when the first three waves superpose, which means we are in a transition period with its specific risks and advantages. Thus, as we can see, humanity has not even gone through the first stage, but two other have already been started and in 2010, the fourth will start as well. In other words, until 2010, the human society is crossing a continuous transition process toward this information world-wide covering. Therefore, the traces of modernity will become even more obvious as we approach 2010, when the first wave


Figure 3. The four waves of information technology

of the simple information technology is completed and the fourth wave is more and more present, namely the global information society wave.

If we analyze the evolution of society by means of the classical comparison: data – information – knowledge, then we will be able to discuss the technology of knowledge, the society of knowledge or the intelligent society (Bergeron, 2002; Cornish, 2004; Demchenko, 1997). By corroborating the above-mentioned ideas, we believe that the following wave of information technologies might start around 2035 - 2040 and may be called the intelligence and knowledge stage. This stage will have as its center of attention information exploitation in order to reach the desired level of intelligence for a certain entity. This will be the period when the capacities of the human brain are reached to a certain extent, when the concept of bio-techno-system is generalized, that is, hybrid systems between biological systems

Where will Information Technology Development Lead us to? We may say at this moment that all the human activity areas have been directly or indirectly influenced by information technology development. Therefore, in most of these areas, new development opportunities, new research approaches, new work, and expression technologies have occurred. This is the human society evolution stage where information technology is found in all the other technologies. And yet, this seems to be only the beginning!

Figure 4. The following wave after the globally information-based society oci

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and technical systems, by means of computer science (Ţugui & Fătu, 2004). Therefore, we foresee even more interesting achievements of artificial intelligence, widely used invisible technologies, and hybrid bio-techno-system technologies with computerized interface. Multimedia, interoperability, and intelligence science hold the attention of the information world today. The jump to tomorrow’s technologies will require the incorporation of the computer as a common item of such technologies. Thus, the computer will remain omnipresent in the background as a facilitator. It has been said that a characteristic quality of tomorrow’s technologies is that they will be calm. There have been more and more voices lately supporting the need for these technologies to become calmer and calmer, that is, a technology with no influence on the environment, individual, and society.

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calm technology and It&c

The Internet and applications deriving from this technology will mediate the transition from the first stage to the third stage (Rijken, 1994). It is clear that information technology expands every second, which leads to the question, how will this technology disturb us? Will it be aggressive toward the environment in which we live? These concerns led to the concept of calm technology, which assumes that computers should disappear into the “background” of our architectural space and easily switch between the center and the periphery of our attention much like ambient displays.

Historical Clues The idea of calm technology originates in the writings of Weiser (1991) of Xerox PARC, who in 1991 in his article “The Computer for the 21st Century,” tackled in detail the concept of ubiquitous computing (UC) in one’s daily life. Weiser with Brown (1995) collaborated in December 1995 with the publication of the book “Designing Calm Technology.” These publications laid the conceptual basis of a future society dominated by calm technologies and the Internet. Afterwards, other specialists have continued to develop the concepts launched by Weiser and Brown. In 1997, on the anniversary of 50 years of computing, the same article was published under the name, “The Coming Age of Calm Technology,” in the book “Beyond Calculation: The Next Fifty Years in Computing” (in Denning & Metcalfe, 1997). Afterwards, other specialists added their ideas to the concept of Calm Technology, including Hermans (1998), in “Desperately Seeking: Helping Hands and Human Touch.” The Evolving Human-Computer Relationship Internet, Internet2, intranets, extranets, cyberspace ... it is hard not to have heard or read about one of these terms in the media (Norman, 1994). Several trends categorize computer use in the information era:

2.

3.

Mainframe stage. Computers were used by experts behind closed doors, and regarded as rare and expensive assets. This stage was the beginning of the information era. The human-computer relationship was one of several humans to a single computer. Personal computing stage. In this stage the human-computer relationship became balanced in the sense that individuals had one-on-one relationships with their computers. This stage brought a certain closeness into the human-computer relationship. Ubiquitous computing stage. In this stage one person will have many computers. People will have access to computers placed in their offices, walls, clothing, cars, planes, organs, and so forth. This stage will have a significant impact on society.

Informing Without Overburdening Technology draws our attention at different levels of awareness. It is either at the center or the periphery of our attention. Weiser and Brown (1996) suggest that we attune to the “periphery” without attending to it explicitly. When driving a car, for instance, our attention is centered on the road, the radio, or our passenger, but not on the noise of the engine. But an unusual noise is noticed immediately, showing that we are attuned to the noise in the periphery, and can quickly attend to it. What is in the periphery at one moment may in the next moment be at the center of our attention. The same physical form may have elements in both the center and periphery.

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A calm technology will move easily from the periphery of our attention, to the center, and back. Technology is closely linked to the concept of affordance, which is a relationship between an object in the world and the intentions, perceptions, and capabilities of a person (Weiser & Brown, 1996).

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Characteristics of a Calm Technology

5. 6. 7.

Calm technology has three basic characteristics: 1.

2.

3.

Calm technologies shift the focus of our attention to the periphery. This technological orientation can be achieved either by smoothly and easily shifting from the center to the periphery and back, or by transferring more details to the periphery. A technology is calm when it increases peripheral perceptions with direct implications on our knowledge, which increases abilities to act adequately in various circumstances without being overburdened with information. Technological connectivity enables a quick anchoring in certain circumstances against the background of a quick shifting from the center to the periphery of our attention, which determines a quick perception of the past, present, and future of the subject. This characteristic leads to what Weiser and Brown (1996) call “locatedness.”

These characteristics are important features when enforcing calm data processing technologies. Using such technology has influences our attention, which leads to an increase of our ability to easily adjust to the environment.

Principal Challenges for IT&C Information technologies and communications belong to the category of technologies with a lower impact on global calmness, however, because they influence people’s lives by stress, radiations, and so forth, we think that we should take the leap toward what we call calm technologies. Thus, we think that the future development of information technologies and communications should consider the following challenges required for the implementation of calm technologies:

2. 3. 4.

Reduction/disappearance of the noise and the radiation caused by information technologies and communications. Lower power consumption. Total disappearance of the cables. Reduction of equipment size, while achieving higher performance. User-friendly and intelligent interfaces. Total interconnectivity and interoperability. Extension of the intelligent nature of information technologies and communications.

The producers of information technologies should consider these seven challenges and we, “the consumers” should also consider these technologies when we require them.

conclusIon Individuals use many technologies with a higher or lower impact on the general calmness. As global calmness beneficiaries, we should contribute to the observance of the law of global calmness, by developing calmer and calmer technologies. Thus, we will also become calmness providers, not only calmness beneficiaries. We all have to agree to the idea that any technology affects directly or indirectly, on a short or long term, locally or globally, the environment from which it comes or to which it will apply. As long as there is life on Earth, we should be interested in the development of technologies that would affect us minimally. We saw in the previous paragraph what the seven challenges for information and communication technologies need to become calm. Of course, by these seven challenges ancillary to information and communication technologies, we have not exhausted the topic of their orientation toward the calmer side. Moreover, as IT&C has evolved, we can see that new demands appeared for them to be called calm technologies. It is important that calmer IT&C should be created to contribute to the general balance of calmness and to have ensured the contribution of computer science applied to the “oasis of calmness” existing on Earth. Furthermore, it is necessary to focus in the field of information and communication technologies on the specific characteristics of the calm technology. We


think that there are necessary minimal standards for the orientation of IT&C toward calm technologies.

Romanian Academy (RA). (2003). Micul Dicţionar Academic, Univers Academic, Bucureşti

references

Tugui, A., & Fătu, T. (2004). What is the globally information-based society followed by? Cyber Society Forum, World Future Society. Retrieved March 22, 2007, from http://www.wfs.org/04tuguifatu.htm

Bergeron, B. (2002). Dark Age II: When the digital data die. NJ: Prentice Hall. Cornish, E. (2004). Futuring: The exploration of the future. MD: World Future Society. Demchenko, Y. (1997). Emerging knowledge based society (information society) and new consciousness formation. Retrieved March 22, 2007, from http://www. uazone.org/demch/ Denning, J.P., & Metcalfe, M.R. (Eds.). (1997). Beyond calculation: The next fifty years in computing. New York: Springer-Verlag. Earth seen from the cosmos. (1972). Retrieved March 22, 2007, from nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov Eckes, Jr., A., & Zeiler, T. (2003). Globalization and the American century. Cambridge University Press. Galaxies seen from 8 million light years. (2004). Retrieved March 22, 2007, from http://www.chinadaily. com.cn/english/doc/2004-03/10/content_313385.htm Hermans, B. (1998, May). Desperately seeking: Helping hands and human touch. Zeist, The Netherlands. Retrieved March 22, 2007, from http://www.hermans. org/agents2/ Josserand, E. (2004). The network organization: The experience of leading French multinationals. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Moschella, D. (1995, May 22). IS Priorities as the information highway era begins. Computerworld, Special Advertising Supplement. Norman, D.A. (1988). The psychology of everyday things. New York: Basic Books. O’Brien, J.A. (1999). Management information systems: Managing information technology in the internetworked enterprise. Boston: McGraw-Hill. Rijken, D. (1994). The future is a direction, not a place. The Netherlands: Netherlands Design Institute, Sandberg Institute.

Weiser, M. (1991, September). The computer for the 21st century. Scientific American Ubicomp paper. Retrieved March 22, 2007, from http://www.ubiq. com/hypertext/weiser/SciAmDraft3.html Weiser, M., & Brown, J. (1995, December 21). Designing Calm technology. Xerox PARC. Retrieved March 22, 2007, from http://www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/ calmtech/calmtech.htm Weiser, M., & Brown, J. (1996, October 5). The coming age of Calm technology. Xerox PARC. Retrieved March 22, 2007, from http://www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/ acmfuture2endnote.htm 2 Million galaxies. (2003). Retrieved March 22, 2007, from http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap030611. html

key terms Aggressive Technology: The technology that is not calm. Bio-Techno-System: Hybrid systems between biological systems and technical systems, by means of computer (science). Calm Technology: Understand that technology that does not affect life or environment in which (or for which) it produced. Cyberspace: Space of action for information and communication technologies. Digital Economy: The networking of the economic entities, by entity’s flow and process digitalization and by the creation and the exchange of digital assets (virtual assets) against the background of the physical extension and the development of Internet. Information Society: Information-based society.

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Information Technologies: Collections of technological fields that develop simultaneously and interdependently. Internet: A network of all networks. Knowledge: Information with sense.

endnotes 1

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http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/200403/10/content_313385.htm http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0306/ galaxies2_apm_big.gif