Amber Case
Watch the livestreamCase opens with two Greek words for time. Chronos is industrial, quantitative time: waiting for a software update, swatting away alerts to reach the task you actually wanted. Kairos is lived time: a sunset, a child's first steps, the hours you remember on your deathbed. Technology promised us more free time but keeps handing back low-quality Chronos time. Calm tech's goal, she says, is to minimize Chronos and maximize Kairos.
Writing her iPhone thesis in 2007, Case wanted a philosophy of technology that would not become obsolete. She found it at Xerox PARC, where Mark Weiser coined 'ubiquitous computing' and argued the scarcest future resource would be attention, not technology. His paper with John Seely Brown reads as if written today. Weiser died at 46, and Case took up expanding his sparse principles into a working framework.
Calm tech is not a yoga mat or Zen aesthetics. It means you stay calm using the tool and can still do the original task. Case's test: you look through glasses, not at them, through a window, not at it. Good technology is a pass-through that dissolves into the task, focusing you on the nail rather than the hammer, so you attend to your humanness and not the machine.
We can physically multitask but not mentally multitask. Case calls this the 'back brain': fast, early, proprioceptive, the reason you can work a car's radio dial at speed without looking. Touchscreens and voice assistants force everything into the slow prefrontal cortex, where you must recall what you named your lights and their percentage. Physical affordances, a raised dot on a button, a light switch you slap, keep interaction in the faster brain.
From her eight principles, Case walks five: technology should require attention only when necessary (a fire alarm shouts, a toilet should not), it should inform and stay calm, it should use peripheral attention, it should communicate without needing to speak (a color-changing faucet, a weather-colored bulb, what she calls infosynesthesia), and it should work even when it fails, the way a broken escalator becomes stairs.
The lever Case chose is certification, modeled on Underwriters Laboratories (the UL stamp, born from Chicago fire-era electrical danger in 1893) and the Good Housekeeping Seal. Her Calm Tech Institute runs an 81-point specification covering primary attention, peripheral attention, robustness, light, sound, and materials. It gives CEOs a marketable reason to remove the blue LED. In roughly two years it has certified around 80 products, including reMarkable and Time Timer.
Case is candid that a standard takes about a decade to matter. LEED green-building certification sat ignored from 1989 until the mid-2000s, then took off. Her strategy is patience: spend little, grow mass, go as long as you can like a glacier. A standard, she says, is like planting a tree, you do not yell at it after three years for not being lumber. The endgame is durable, family-run companies whose products last for decades.