Calm Technology in Commercial Product

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Find and discuss one example of calm technology in a commercial product. The example can be a product that completely blends into the background, or it can be a feature of a product that uses the principles of calm technology.

Course

48-739 Making Things Interactive

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Making Things Interactive (MTI) is a studio course based on physical prototyping and computing. You will develop novel sensing, interaction and display techniques through projects and short assignm...more

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Discussion 1
  • Calm Technology
    Zac Hinton
    Zac Hinton Posted on 2016-01-20 09:32:18 -0500.

    2 years ago Google released a new form of notifications that included ambient/calming technology on their Nexus phones. When most cellphones receive a notification, the phone lights up or vibrates and a message enters the screen with information about the notification. All of these actions are done to notify the user in a very obtrusive way to demand the user's attention.

    Google made their Nexus 6 notifications ambient by doing something very simple: they changed the initial notification background to black and the text to white. The black background basically matches with the physical device of the phone which makes the screen pretty calming. When a user clicks on the notification, the screen changes and provides more information about that notification only. Furthermore, when the user picks up the phone the black notification screen fades in. Here is the link to the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TyhaOjME5g