In the era of Pervasive / Ubiquitous Computing, information and communication technologies (ICT) are embedded into our everyday life deeply, and people spends a plenty of time for using various ICT services. This development has brought along lots of opportunities but also raise many challenges. The problem is that most of today’s digital interactive services typically demand user's full and focused attention for using it (Hausen 2012). They’re scrambling to catch user’s focused attention and demand large portion of his/her limited mental resources (Wicken 2008) simultaneously. As a result, especially in non-task-oriented ordinary everyday situations, users sometimes experience mental overburdening, which causes increased mental stress (Moraveji 2012). We aim at reducing the excitement of information overload by using calm technology, particularly when we embed ICT into our ordinary situations. Calming technology aims at making our life more relaxed and pleasant by reducing the overburden of demanding our central attentions, while keeping them connected with what is truly important at the center of our attentions. It shifts the focus of our attentions to the periphery – either by smoothly shifting from the center to the periphery and back (Weiser & Brown 1997). In order to embed ICT more seamlessly into our everyday practices, we need to understand cultural and social aspects of everyday life deeply. To do this, in addition to User-Centered Design, we employ sociological methods including qualitative research methods.
In this talk, I will introduce some of our research projects, toward calming technology: (1) Peripheral communication environment for supporting families who live-apart, (2) Unconscious communication through human spatial behavior, and (3) Intelligent support for discovering latent relationships among ideas. Finally, I will address future challenges of this area.
Keywords: ubiquitous computing, calm technology, peripheral communication, non-verbal communication, user centered design.