Calm Technology

Transcript

There's also a really big time timer for groups and it can do up to eight hours of time and it's like larger than a basketball. >> I'm gonna I'm gonna wait like Three more minutes. Is that okay? >> Great. Yeah, that's okay. >> Cool. >> And he's still moving. [laughter] Exactly.

>> I think it's a little The talk is going to be on calm

technology and the history of standards because people love talking about standards and the history of standards, right? >> Yes. Another standard. >> Yeah. Another standard. >> Yeah. So let's first talk about the original promise of technology. At least in the media, we're told that tech should give us more free time and not less. But I ask, what's the quality of time that tech is actually giving us when it's giving us this so-called more free time? In in the beginning, you had electricity and the killer app for electricity was the washing machine, the freezer, all sorts of cool things that were really helpful for lowerass people more than they were for middle class

people because middle class people already had servants to do all those things. It really affected people who were like ironing things all day in the heat of Hill Country, Texas. They called them sad irons because it sucked to use them. It was just like a really horrible thing. people were aging like 10 or 20 years until one of the US presidents, Lyndon Johnson, was like, "We're going to have electricity." And now you will not have to age 10 or 20 years earlier because you're doing all this manual labor because you don't have electricity. Um, when that electricity happened, um, it it was delayed in Hill Country, Texas, which is a terrible place to plant anything or live any live at all. And um people would come back to

their houses at night and the day that the electricity turned on, they thought their houses were on fire cuz they had never seen it before. Now, electricity was built in a really interesting way. First, it was built in a way hopefully that didn't catch your house on fire, even though running through the house was something that could cause a fire for no good reason at any time. There were electricians. There were standards around that. And you didn't have to be an electrician in order to use a light switch. you could just tap on the wall and use a light switch. Very interesting, super complex, super easy affordance. So when we talk about the original promise of tech to give us more time, what is the quality of time that we're giving people? What is the quality

of time that we gave lowerass people by allowing appliances into their house? What is the quality of time we're giving ourselves by having all these automations? And I like to go to the Greek concepts of time. One concept is called Kronos time and the other one is called chyros time. So Kronos time is more time spent on tasks and more quantitative experiences for lack of a better term. It's kind of like when you want to watch a movie, but it says, "Sorry, you have to download the software update in order to do this."

It's just another little gnat of technology updates and alerts that you have to swat away in order to do the task that you want to do. Or it's the time of 9:00 a.m. to 10 a.m. having a specific meeting, having a specific agenda. It's a more industrial time. It's useful for a factory, but it's not the time that you remember on your deathbed. That's Cairo's time. The lived experience of time is watching a sunset, falling in love, holding a loved one's hands for the first time, watching a child's first steps. It's the time where you forget about time where you're completely in the moment. And to me, this is a very human time. This is a very special time. And this is the time that I thought technology would promise us as it began to fill like a gas every

available space in our lives. So, Kronos time. Chyros time. Yeah. Kyus time. Yeah. Okay. So, now we live in this era of interruptive technology. The Wi-Fi goes out. The the the thing that you bought for your home doesn't work anymore because the company went out of business. The smart pet feeder has an update that's attached to the the web and that remote server goes down and you can't feed your pets anymore. And so, you have to get someone to break into your house to feed those pets. And in the terms of service, it says, "You agree not to hold us accountable or rely on this for any purposes of feeding or watering your pet. You are lacking so much that you must have this pet feeder [laughter]

to me." >> Yes. [laughter] >> Okay. Yeah. So, petnet.io is terrible. Don't buy them. Um, >> do not get into this. >> Yeah. [laughter] So the company goes out of business and you have a bunch of e-ways, right? If you were trained as an engineer and and ideally a good one, the first thing that happens to you in an engineering class as an engineering student of which you are not trained as a computer scientist because it's a different thing is ideally the first day maybe 9th grade maybe college is there's Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Washington in 1940. It was a bridge that they kept open even though there were specific wind conditions

outside of the rating of the bridge. And you see this go they call it gallop and gertie and there's all of these cars on and like people are falling off and the whole point is to have people panic. You want people to say, "Oh my gosh, it is my responsibility as a civil engineer." Not to make a bridge that Mary, wife of 10 years and three children and my persona that I've made as a UX professional can go through. No, humans and cargo can go on this bridge and they will not die. Even if you have a subcontractor making the bridge, you can cut this many corners and the bridge will not fail and you will not extinguish life with your design.

And that's instilled into every engineering student if you have a good engineering education. But you don't get any of that if you do software. Yet, how many more lives are you touching at an accelerated rate? And we say, "Oh, well, it's just wasting someone's time. It's the user's fault." No, it's our responsibility because design is governance. And so many people have no mouth, but they must scream. And so, we live in this era of interruptive technology that kind of sucks. It's a mild dystopia. It's not dystopian enough that we would revolt against how crappy it is. We have Corey Dr. talking about initification because most software is funded by like venture capital and private equity. So, it has to get worse over time after they give you like something really nice for

a couple years and you're like, "Wow, I love this. I finally get to use this new banking app." No, you cannot. It's been bought by Capital One. So, we need a calm technology. And what is calm technology? It it's not like a zen like notion cone. It's not a yoga mat in an empty room. It's not like some Lululemon leggings in a trust fund area of California. No, that's not what calm technology is. It's that you're calm when you use it and you can do the original task that you wanted to do. So maybe we call it calm tech's goal is to minimize Kronos time, this industrial time, and to maximize human time, Chyros time. Hooray.

So how do we do that? This talk is all about how to do that. Hooray. So um Xerox Park Palo Alto Research Center was this really interesting place in the 80s and 90s and they created the future before it happened. They they had a dress rehearsal for the future. Um they were the first people to live stream on the web. This this weirdo Markiser had a band called Severe Tire Damage, which is what happens if you back up in the parking lot in a in a California garage that says severe tire damage. He thought this would be a great band. And so when they got the Rolling Stones to be the very first band to live stream on the web, the live streaming platform they built, by the way, um they said, "Can we open for you?" And thus became the

actual first man to live stream on the internet. But they also asked questions like what happens when technology is cheap enough to be everywhere because it was really expensive at the time. Um mainframe computers, the Xerox Park Alto, which is where we got the Mac user interface, these were everywhere. All of Eddi, which was a typewriter company, gave everyone badges and you could walk around and you could see where everyone was on a big bulletin board in real time in like 1993. And then you could be like, "Ah, everyone's over here, this person's office." And that would be the exciting thing that you would go to see.

It's like somebody's working on something cool. So they asked, "What happens when technology is cheap enough to be everywhere?" And he coined this term called ubiquitous computing. And then he died when he was 46 and we don't have him anymore. So he determined the scarcest resource in the future is not technology. It will be attention. and how technology works with or against our attention will make or break the future of technology and human experience. Then he wrote a bunch of cool papers.

One of the papers is called the coming age of calm technology. Says the important waves of technological change are those that fundamentally alter the place of tech in our lives. What matters not is the tech itself but its relationship to us. Now, I was writing my thesis on the iPhone in 2007, right when it came out. And I wanted to find a philosophy of technology that didn't age. You don't look at a grand piano and say, "Oh my gosh, that technology is so old. Throw it away." But you go to a garage shell and you're like, "Wow, that book from Windows 95 only like 20 years ago is very outdated. I definitely can't use that." You toss it. What's the difference?

One is really really made to be alongside us as a technology as a piano and we are moving through it as a pass through technology and the other one is kind of like this weird thing that we go through as a piece of software. So it became very interesting to see this philosophy of technology that if you read these papers from the '90s they all read like today you could you they could be published online right now and we'd say wow that was really good on hacker news or whatever. I really enjoyed reading that that thing from 2026. And that's what I love about it. It's like very few people were so into the future that they understood it as the present and then wrote about it as it as it was. So I looked into these papers and I saw these hazy principles and

there wasn't much there. And then I learned that this person died and I cried because it was super annoying that he died really young and that he was so interesting. And um so I started to try to work on this like expand the principles, publish a book about it, try to bring it into the world. And I had to do it very slowly because if I did it too quickly, advertisers would get excited about it and completely destroy the thing from the beginning and then we would have calm tech Lululemon leggings. So another way to talk about calm tech is that tech should function as a pass through for everyday experiences and tasks allowing us to focus on humanness and not machines. Simply put, I'm

wearing glasses right now and I'm looking through them, not at them. You're wearing shoes and you're walking through the shoes, not at the shoes. You're not focused on the shoes. If these chairs are comfortable enough, you don't notice them until I just pointed them out to you. And a window is something you look through, not at unless it's dirty. And you say, "Man, [clears throat] I should really wash that window." But the idea is that it's a pass through. You focus on the nail, not the hammer. You focus on the view, not the car. All the way in which that's been made focuses on wait a different part of our brain. Wait, how does our brain work? Okay, first let's go to an example for a car. Which buttons are easier to press on the road? On the left, you can see this is a terrible

touchcreen that looks really cool in an advertisement and is horrible to use on the road. Here is an old car that everyone says, "Well, that's outdated. Look at those buttons." This is easy to use on the road because we have this thing called propriception and we know where things are. And so once we know where the radio button is, we can use the radio button. And so you can go down the road at 100 km an hour while talking with somebody next to you, turning the radio dial, putting on your turn signal, having the windshield wipers go on, and you can be changing the radio and putting the windows. You can do everything because it turns out that we can physically multitask just fine because that's in a different part of our brain. Let's for lack of a better

term, let's call it back brain to make it easy to talk about. Our back brain is an early brain. Touch is the first sense that's developed in the moon. And we have at least like 240 mechano receptors on each fingertip. Here's a fingertip if you don't have one. And in here we can do so much. There's so much variation and understanding because touch being the instant thing. If we touch a hot stove, it goes. We just immediately recoil. We don't go into our front brain, prefrontal cortex, and say, "hm, maybe I should take my finger off the stove. Should I? Oh, I don't know. Maybe let me make a Gant chart to understand the differences

between the benefits and pros and cons, and I might hire McKenzie to help me with this." By that time, your entire hand is eviscerated. So, we're doing this thing where we're taking this beautiful sensor that's in an earlier brain that's faster, instantly, and phys capable of physically multitasking. And we're using it to touch glass all day long or undifferentiated keys on a keyboard without anything other than maybe like a tiny raised divot that tells you where the home row is.

How stupid of us. What a waste of time we are as a human civilization right now. Giving us sensory deprivation all day long and saying, "Oh, well, why are we depressed? Why are we anxious? Why do we wake up in the morning and scroll Tik Tok and other people's ideas before our own? Because we used to go outside and see all the differences in nature and then make an idea. No, we are like dogs that go online seeking some sort of sensory information and we get none. Our frontal cortex goes, we get no benefits in the back brain where we're doing cortisol reduction and all sorts of nice things.

And so we just keep going to this endless feast, this endless cornucopia that's never satisfying. And and advertisers know this. That's that's how things work right now. It works very well for everybody except us. Great. So the other thing is that this looks good in an ad and people were so afraid when iPhone came out and Tesla came out that this wouldn't be a like this would be the new thing and no one would buy a car without a touchcreen. And also, it's way cheaper to do this than to physically articulate buttons. Buttons, by the way, that developed over so many years. Like, I like to go hang out with cars from the ' 50s. And there's all sorts of cool stuff like buttons, ashtrays, like there's even like these amazing like

tables that come out from the back seat so that you can like write in the back of the car while someone's driving you around. I mean, this is awesome. And we've just removed a bunch of this stuff. So, even our driving is the sensory deprivation now. Now, if you're on a Zoom call a lot, it's not very fun. You're not really storing memories. You're not really there. And if you're typing all the time instead of writing, you have to take five times the amount of notes as physically writing because each writing shape um actually like stimulates your brain in that shape of that letter. So, you're more likely to remember if you write down physically on paper that has a little tooth. Um,

but yeah, you can go on a walk and look the back brain. Yeah. Okay. So, in a car, even a rental car, you learn how to drive a car once, you can use almost every car. You might be able to even use a tractor. You could use like lots of things that have forward motion. Wow, cool. Even a bike. Learn it once, never have to learn it again. Um, you know where you are without looking. You can get up from these chairs without looking right now. Could you use anything on your phone without looking? It's very hard. Also, in a car you have a foot pedal. Did you know that when the the mouse first came out, it had a foot pedal so you could scroll down the page as well?

And then we lost it like some weird like tonsil. It's so sad. And now, you know, streamers, they have pedals and things like that for like different reactions. Now, that's good. Sewing machines, footpowered lives in Japan, so many things have had foot pedals. And we're like, we've we've also not only are we in sensory defformation with our fingertips touching glass, we also have lost the appendage of our feet. This sucks. Okay, so distracted light driving is literally a loss of touch. Everyone's like, "Oh, let's put a touch screen on everything." Would you want a touchcreen for your steering wheel? No.

So, let's talk about this term neurogonomics. It's how it feels to use something. This is a complicated camera, but the minute that you learn how to use it, hooray. Minute you learn how to use it, you look through the camera, you know where all the buttons are. And it takes a long time to learn this, just like it takes a long time to learn how to write. But this is what's so cool about our brains. Once we remember a thing, we remember it. Here are some people making things out of clay. Here are some advanced people who are very famous making things out of clay that have pretty much influenced everything that you sit in or live in at this mo point in modern society, which I

would consider more Victorian 2.0 times because it's a bunch of unregulated junk that we have to experience all the time and everything's being sold as like the coolest thing that saves your time. Like you can look at a Sears catalog in 1901, it says the exact same thing as like regular claw generated like advertising stuff. It's very similar time. But I would say that every centimeter of distance between the designer's hand and the material that they use is a tax [snorts] paid by the person who has to live alongside the object. So when people are making something in in CAD curated design first versus making it with their hands as their first understanding, it's it's a level of abstraction. And as

we get more and more into something that's more generated before it is real, we lose the inherent understanding that we have with our hands without language, our first touch. So you can make it with CAD or you can make it with people. This is a silly chair. This is the Beverly Hills chair. Um, this person in 1941 said, "I'm going to take a bunch of clay and I'm going to cover it in plastic and I am going to have everybody in the company sit on the chair and it's going to be an average of the hundred people at the company." Then he made the chair in real life and it became an incredibly popular lawn chair that everybody bought for like 20 years because it was the average of people's

butts. And the average of people's butts is very cozy. >> But could you average people's butt in CAD? No, a robot is not comfortable to sit on. Our hands have eyes, too. Maybe our butts. Um, every time you're touching something, without looking, you can understand the difference between different materials. And there are fake materials that are low quality and there are real materials that are high quality. Look at this floor. This is really nice. It's a real floor. It shows time. Time calms us down. If we are a human and we're in a space without fractals, as in nature, or a real object, we will say, "Oh, this is an area in which it's kind of been like

a coral reef that's been bleached." There's there's like all the little signals in our back brain that say, "Leave. Leave. You shouldn't be here. You could die. There's no life here. There's no life here. Go away." And it's really hard to be creative in a space like that, which is like why I try to come to spaces like this. There's time associated with them. There's decay. You can see life. There's also like cool bugs, you know, it's great. But now we're living in this texture famine. And what does the mind actually need to calm down? We need to be kids. We need to play in a river, which we will do later today if you want to join me for the breakout session at 2:30. We will walk to a secret part of a river and hang out in the river.

We need variable input and sensory engagement. This was me uh after being on a computer for a really long time getting really upset. I was staying at my friend's house in uh Brooklyn and so I just like ran around a tree with a giant stick going but I could feel my bre my back brain afterwards and it was really nice. I was like ah this is like a screen saver. Now [clears throat] in the Victorian times and all time in history, you see that every culture has their own worship of nature like beautiful crafts bringing the outside inside um and having like this worship of like animals, creatures,

plants, you know, and putting them in two or three dimensions inside a house. And then you see this start to go away in the age of speed, especially in the 1930s. And then you see um this is uh Tati's Playtime, which is a hilarious film from 1967, all about this French comedian making fun of the future of France in which everything is modern and glass and flat. And he predicted all of it. All of this is a set. The entire city was a set and he rolled it around on these giant stages. And he built a city in real life for this thing. Um, but he really predicted what it would feel like to be in the future. And he made all sort there's like automation in it and there's like computers that fail and there's like seats that are really loud and HVAC systems that are terrible.

And this is one of my favorite films of all time because it's a funny look at it instead of a serious look at it. >> Which one is it? >> It's called uh Playtime by Jacqu Tati from 1967. Yeah. So fun. Like one just ridiculous. Oh, and there's an American that shows up on a tour bus as like the foil to the film, and so it becomes even sillier. And then there's a restaurant that isn't fully completed, but they're rushing to do it. Everything's falling down on everyone. It's great. It's just how it is making software. Um, so we need more information in our environments to fill calm. There's research that says if you look outside and see at least three trees, you'll be smarter, you'll recover

better in a hospital bed. Great. But I think we can take this further. We can say that our brains relax when they're in space is legible to us. And that counts in software, too. If that's legible to us and we know what to do because there's familiar markers, there's familiar symbols, there's enough spacing that we don't make errors, then we relax. If you are an airplane pilot, this is a relaxing space to you. If you are not, this is a stressful space to you and you want to leave it immediately. If you are used to being in New York City, that's a relaxing space for you. That's your nature. The nature here is buildings.

If you're in the forest and you grew up in the forest, that's a relaxing space to you because you can see what's going on in the environment. There's all these signals. So, technology should not draw more attention to itself than its surrounding environment. Um, this is in Sienna Cathedral. Um, one of the people at Calm Techch Institute sent me this photo. Here's this like this looks just like the Jacqu Tati film where they have like the giant computer from the ' 50s just sitting there in the corner. Um, this didn't have to be this way. They could have covered it with like some Wayne Scotting or they could have even taken like some some molds of some old plaster and filled it with like a glue gun so

that you could have like a plastic version of it and gilded it over. Like you could have done anything to to hide this with like a little cabinet you could open so that it would like be camouflaged. No, we can't camouflage technology. We can't make it out of wood. We can't use any other material. It must be black plastic extruded. No, there's so many cool things you could do with it. And somehow it still feels like an alien species. Like that lamp right here in the middle of the room, that's a piece of technology. It doesn't look like a series of electrical outlets that have been like cut off into the wall and extruded into a light bulb. And you know, no, it's decorative. There's so much creativity around that. And then you have these speakers. What could you

do with those? There's interesting things you could do. Could you put a tapestry in front of them? I don't know. But we our imagination is like we can imagine a lamp. We can imagine a chair. We can imagine a floor. And then after that era, we stopped imagining what things could look like. And they just look like an alien spaceship of like black extruded plastic. What happened to our imagination? We got that brief period in the 90s where we had like translucent technology that was super cool and like gameboys and stuff and it looks really nice because there's colors.

Not that we'll bring that back. Hopefully we do, hopefully we don't. And then we also have this issue where blue LEDs, which originally were the most expensive LED to buy and work with, became really cheap, earning someone a Nobel Prize. This is my recreation of someone's bathroom that I used at night. You open up the toilet and it's a smart toilet so it's like bright blue light because it's from the future. I could not go to sleep after this because the whole bathroom filled with this like piercing unfiltered unmitigated bright blue light along with all of their other appliances in their house and you know Samsung washing machines or whatever.

And it became really upsetting. And I I looked at why is the color of the future blue and why now that we have cheap LEDs do we decide to use them unfiltered everywhere? And I think it goes back to the history of painting. At one point in time, lapis lazuli, which is a beautiful blue, was the most expensive pigment you could buy. And you would wait to paint the Virgin Mary in whatever color of paint was the most expensive at the time. And so there's a lot of blue Virgin Mary because that's the most expensive color.

And the funny thing is the same thing happened with light. Blue was the most energyintensive LED to do. It was $40 when I was a kid at Radio Shack. I could never use them in the circuit boards I made with my dad. I was upset. And I said, "One day it'll be really cheap." And my dad was like, "Yes, but watch out. Then we'll have like LCD displays and that'll be crazy." And I was like, "Oh no." And it got really cheap. And now because that was formerly a really expensive color that got into film and science fiction as the color of the future is blue. So we're dealing with our own version of the Virgin Mary in painting in our own lives. And it doesn't feel like the Virgin Mary. It feels like a terrible toilet that won't let you sleep at night.

Anyway, so here here's some principles of calm technology. Um, the first one is that technology should not require all of our attention, just some of it, and only when necessary. How do you determine when it's necessary? Is your building on fire? It should shout at you. That should be a fire alarm. Hooray. Is it a uh a toilet? Maybe it shouldn't have super bright lights. It could have like a nice orange glow light that's like they call it a toe kick light. Just like a little light around your feet so that you can see enough of the floor so you don't stumble, but it doesn't destroy your night vision. Oh, that's nice. How about a light switch?

You know, there's light switches in here right now among us. Are you thinking about them? No, because they're invisible. Are they invisible because they're actually invisible? No, because we don't think about them. We get home at night, we're tired, we don't know where the light switch is. Tap the ball, you'll find the light switch. Are you three years old and don't know about how to use a light switch and can't pronounce the word the term electrical engineering? No problem. Grab a chair. Get to the height of the light switch. Turn it off. Wow, that's great. That works pretty well. Do you go home and say, "Alexa, turn on the what did I call again? The basement two lights to 50%.

Sorry, I didn't understand you. You don't have a perfect American accent." And which our model was trained on. How many of you have to fake American accent to use your smart devices? [laughter] That's not a pass through technology. First off, when you wake up in the morning, you want to turn on your lights. Your physical part of your body can go bam. Because remember, we can physically multitask and we can't mentally multitask. Once you have to go into this prefrontal cortex and remember what the name of the light is and what percent you want to send it to, you're in a different part of your brain. And that brain is slower and evolved later and it sucks. It's not that it totally sucks. You can do all sorts of cool

stuff. You can write with it, but it sucks for doing the basic stuff in your life because it takes all of your attention away from that physical interaction and puts it into this annoying one. I don't want to have to remember what I called my lights in my house when I wake up in the morning. I want to be able to slap the wall and turn the lights on. Okay. So, is a car invisible when you drive it? Is a book invisible when you read it? You know, you get sucked into a really good book and the interface is so good that it dissolves. Think about this next time you do something. Think about whether you see the thing or whether you're experiencing the thing. A lot of VR has failed because we did too much and the brain has nothing left to provide to it and

therefore we can't really make it part of our own. Okay. So, pass through technology. Now my question for you is today if you can think about all of the things in your everyday life that are so well known by daily use that you no longer notice them. It's really hard to do that because your propriceptive self, your backbrain has made them kind of invisible. But those are the best designed technologies and those are the ones that still make plenty of money and are real giant industries don't need venture capital to run because they have actual business models that don't need advertising to run. You don't say, "Sorry, we're waiting for this chair to

load. Please wait 30 seconds. Please watch this ad and then we'll open the chair for you." I'm not going to give anyone ideas, but I'm sure there's massage chairs and airports that do that. Um, technology should inform and in calm. What's a really great way of of doing this? Here's a banana pill. You don't have to open the banana to see what's going on inside. It tells you on the outside. Oh my gosh, this is a brilliant piece of technology. It's about how information is communicated.

Mark Wiser at Xerox Park said, "There's just as much information available to you in a crowded city as a lush forest." But one of them can enrage us and the other one calms us down. Why? It's how the information is communicated. This is a bunch of non-verbal communication with a bunch of different colors. This has a lot of colors, too. A bunch of fake flowers and shades of red telling you to get Budweiser and Coca-Cola and a bunch of orange caps, thankfully, so you know where you can go.

Tech should make use of peripheral attention. My number one use case for this is you go to a hotel and you don't know how to turn off the TV because it's always on because the TV manufacturer has removed the buttons on the back. They're capacitive, which means you have to guess and you might click every other button cuz there's no click. And the whole point is that if you really want to turn it off, you unplug it, which means you have to move the dresser, which is like, you know, it's like 3:00 in the morning. You're jet lag. You're moving the dresser and then you got to like unplug it. Or you take the TV and go and hope it doesn't break and you take your phone, light it up, and then you look for the tiny symbol which has

been worn off because everyone's tried to do this before you. And they've sprayed it on with some sort of decal solution that means nothing. They don't care about you at all. It's a Samsung TV. Sorry, Samsung. And then you finally turn that off. Every single TV in the past either had the button on the front or to prevent kids from turning on and off a lot and annoying everyone, they put it on the back and there's a raised dot or a a nice bar that you can fill with your fingertip. Great. Again, it's physical multitasking. Put a freaking raised dot on your button. Make the area surrounding the button texturally different in a way that doesn't cost you more than one cent in your supply chain. Wow, you'll make a better TV. Is it that hard? People

aren't deliberately not doing this. They're just saying, "Oh, well, it's cheaper to do it this way." And there's no one to like advocate on behalf of consumers to say, "Hey, it shouldn't be this way. Check this out. This is a copy machine." The anthropologists who helped design this copy machine said, "Wow, engineers are designing copy machines." And they want people to do anything with the copy machines. But most people don't want to use a copy machine like an engineer. They just want to have a copy button and a print button and they want to be able to have a conversation around the copy machine while they're doing it. So you put the interaction style into physical. And now you can feel for the start button. Look at how much articulation. There's this weird alien symbol on it that I bet you don't even remember from the last time. You might

have used this, which you might not have ever. And then there's this like long bar for stop. Start and stop. Great. On a on a laptop, you could have a small bar for a lower volume and a large bar for higher volume. Is it that hard to do? We have to think about it. It would be great. Oh, so my friend was dating somebody who's who's has trouble seeing. And she was like, "Well, I can't get into your house because I don't know where the buttons are because it's flat." And so she put these there's like these little tiny raised um articulations on it, just like these stickers, bumpy stickers. and she put one on the five and one on the top. And now she can use her hand to [snorts] see where the five is and get into his

house. And he said, "Oh my gosh, I didn't realize that I was turning the light on my phone to illuminate the keypad at night so that I could get into my own house. And now I don't have to do that either." Technology should communicate, but it doesn't need to speak. What does that mean? That means that you can take information and turn it into a different sense. We can call this infosynesthesia. Da da da da. Here's an example. This is temperature of a faucet and it's changed color based on the the um temperature of of of the water, right?

>> So, you could turn on your shower and wait for the favorite color of purple and then take a shower. It's also good if there's something like really hot that could kill you. It could be like a really bright red. Um plumbers use this all the time. They make a pipe that's red and they make a pipe that's blue. It's fine. My old co-founder made this thing for our house which was called weather status lighting. It was a Hue light bulb, Philips Hue light bulb connected to a weather report. We had the weather report on a cron job so it would grab the weather every day and store it. So if the power went out or whatever, we'd have backups and weather. It would just change the color of the light bulb in the kitchen to what the weather would be for the day and we would color code it.

So I lived in Portland, Oregon at the time. And it was usually blue because it was usually rain or this horrible fluorescent light of of undifferentiated soul time that like people have to experience it. It was terrible. But this particular morning I woke up and walked into the kitchen before I looked at the light bulb. I felt the color and the color was yellow. And that's all you need to do. It's it's in your peripheral attention. It's low resolution and you could feel the future of what the temperature would be. It's a low resolution feeling weather report. It's no disembodied female voice that wakes up the single Silicon Valley person in the ad and says, "Hello, Dave.

Here's your weather report, blah blah blah blah blah." No, it just gives you the future. And if you want higher resolution information in your prefrontal cortex where you're reading stuff, you can then look at the iPad on the wall. But it's your choice and that's what matters. I'm only covering five principles today because I want to send us off and into a discussion. But um technology should work even when it fails. So your petn net feeder should have a backup feeding schedule and a battery backup in case the power goes out. And that should stay stable for at least 48 hours and also alert you. Um and an escalator when it breaks turns into stairs.

Awesome. as an engineer. Again, at the beginning of the talk talking about seeing something catastrophically fail, it's your first introduction engineering. There's so many companies that don't want to think about what happens when the server goes down when something fails. And they don't want to make the experience of failure delightful. But if you make the experience of failure absolutely delightful, cool things happen. First, you get a lot of loyalty and trust. And two, you get engineers that actually care about the people they're making stuff for.

It's so hard to see the screen, but here's the the eight principles of column tech. The ones that I didn't cover um were amplify the best of tech and the best of humanity. Don't try to do stuff uh as a machine that humans are good at and vice versa. You end up having people on an automated phone call system sound like robots as they try to get through the system. respect social norms. As in, if you're making a new player like Spotify, make a play button that looks like a cassette tape play button so that everybody who uses a piece of music technology uses the same symbols, no matter if it's the 70s or the 2030s.

And then use the minimum amount of tech to solve the problem. Uh because if you overbuild it, everything is a dependency and it's really expensive to maintain. And if you're like me, you don't want to maintain software for a long time. You want to maintain the least amount of software and you want to build as much new software as humanly possible. Yeah, the new is so cool. Also, the old is cool too. Good design allows people to accomplish their goals in the least amount of moves. And calm tech allows people to accomplish the same goals with the least amount of cognitive cost so that you can go on being human instead of acting like a machine and a bad one at that. So, let's do a bit of an autopsy on the

current era. Why do people keep creating annoying technologies? Why does every VP and president of companies say, "Wow, wouldn't it be cool if we did this thing and then you have to build it because that's your job?" Because they read things like Popular Mechanics magazine and they watch a bunch of science fiction. I did this, too. I watched more Star Trek, though, and Star Trek's awesome. Um, but the future that we're trying to build towards is not only unimaginative, it's outdated. It's outdated by at least 70 years. I mean, AI came out in 1956. And again, what matters is not the tech itself, but its relationship to us. So, our tech right now is poisoning our time and it's invisible. And because it's

invisible, we don't shout about it. We just say, "Oh, it's so annoying. I had to do that thing again, and I have to do this stupid car with this thing." You know, and we say, "This is just how it is." And we accept it. We don't have to accept it. How do we design for a future of better human experiences? If we think about design as governance and what we design something as allows people to have a bunch of actions or not um there's this this book this short story by Harlon Ellison that says I have no mouth but I must scream and there's so many ways in which we can't send any information back because everything is forward only and in cybernetics it's a feedback loop and in nature it's a feedback loop and you have to have

feedback to improve things over time. So, I was looking at this and I said, "Wow, there's absolutely nothing I can do for this. I'm just going to say this thing that every person agrees with, but every company is like, there's no way. We can't do this. We cannot sustain making money and our Mckenzie consultants will not allow it either." And I'll be like, "No, there's a way. What kinds of organizations have made change in the past?" Go back all the way to Victorian times and see what happened and see also that these organizations make a lot of money and they've made huge changes in the world. Okay, what organizations are they?

This is Underwriter Laboratories. You see the UL stamped on everything that you plug into a wall. And this came out in 1893 in the Chicago's World's Fair. Remember that big Chicago fire that happened that like was really, really terrible. And remember, there were a lot of fires in the past that like completely decimated places. Electricity was new and exciting and dangerous. And at the World's Fair, everybody said, "Wow, wow, wow. We want to put electricity in our booth to do cool stuff. Just like today, we want to put blue LEDs everywhere because it's the color of the future.

And um someone was like, "Oh, no you don't. I have to manage these booths and these crazy people putting flammable stuff right next to each other. No, no, no, no, no. I'm going to make this company. It's going to be called Unreal Laboratories. And I'm going to make the first set of safety standards for putting electricity into a booth." And then that became a huge company. It makes like over a billion a year. And sadly, they were always privately held. And then some investment banker convinced some executive and now they're publicly traded, which means that they have to care about what investors uh care about and not safety. But stamped on almost every product in the world is connected into the wall is UL. You have to go through it. When I made electric car chargers [clears throat] in college,

like we had to go through UL certification, too. Like it's important to protect people. Remember when those hoverboards were catching fire on planes? Those were fake UL safety stamps so that they could get through border control. This tiny mark has more impact on the world than so many other things. Then you have this also from Victorian times. This is the Good Housekeeping seal of approval. Um this one's from at least 1890. They said look there are all these terrible products coming out in the Victorian times and what that means is that um people can't trust any of the products. So, we're going to buy them ourselves, test them, and we're going to say, "These ones actually make good on their promise. And if it's not true,

we'll refund you. Send the product to us, and we'll give you a refund." And this was like a very intense stance in an era in which there were so many scams and AI generated text in the 1890s. Um, and and you know, it was a terrible thing. And now this still exists. This predated and helped the Federal Drug Administration, the Federal Food Safety Testing in the US. It helped predate that and help that come into form. Now, of course, we've relaxed a bunch of those regulations in the US and some people are dying from ecoli poisoning. Surprise, surprise. But standards are really important. And the first time I learned about a standard was when I was a kid playing with Sculpey clay. It's like a weird clay and bright colors you bake in an oven and it makes cool stuff.

But I saw this little stamp on it that said AP AP non-toxic. And I asked my dad, I was like nine. I was like, "Dad, what's that?" And he's like, "That's a standard." And I was like, "What does it do?" He's like, "It governs like whether there's toxic stuff in there." And I said, "What does that mean?" He said, "Look, there's all sorts of nasty stuff in art art supplies and chemicals. There's cadmium, heavy metals, arsenic, green, you know, whatever. Lead and white paint. Makes the stuff look good. Makes color fast. But then I learned that this was the thing that was keeping me safe as a kid. These two letters on like a little seal. And I got really interested in like the power of something that didn't look like anything. And so I was like, okay, I'm

gonna make one myself. So two years ago, I was like, let's let's let's look at what anybody has done a certification on how much attention, how much time, how much annoyance it takes to use a product, whether it's your back brain or your front brain. And this is this column tech certified stamp of approval because it's the Victorian times again. Let's make another Victorian style standard. Gosh, stuff sucks right now. And the only way to change it is to now companies will come to me. It's been about two years and we have like 80 products. And I'll be like, "What do you mean we have to take out the blue button or the blue the blue light?" And I'll be like, "Well, you know, when we tested it, it it filled up the entire living room with a bright light and you made the ye frame.

How you know?" And then they said, "Well, what's going to happen?" I was like, "Well, you won't get certified if you do that." Oh, no. Now the VPs and the CEOs and everybody can say, "Oh, well, we need certification because it's a marketing thing and it's a sign of trust. Oh, finally there's some leverage. Finally, instead of saying, "Oh, something's good." And you know, there's companies that care about good, but they have to care about the bottom line more. Now there's something that we can say to work alongside them to make their industrial designers happy and to make their customers happy to report about it. So we have 81 points. There's primary attention. how much primary attention it takes to use the product.

Peripheral attention. Does it have a bright blue light or not? Does it have a tactility on the back of the, you know, the monitor? Robustness. Does it work when it fails? The company goes out of business. Does it still work or does it strand your pets and almost kill them? Um, light. Is it annoying light? Are those LEDs covered up? Are they diffused? There's so many strategies you can do. Sound. Does it sound like a microwave or not? Is it is it built within the limits of the speaker hardware? And then materials. I look at supply chain. I look at how people like manage their workers. I look at if there's plastic in the product. Is it made with like cool beat plastic? Is there recyclable materials in the packaging? There's all sorts of little

things to look at. Um so now people suddenly have an opportunity to differentiate their brand with experiences that work with attention. Okay. Okay, now the problem is this will not take off in more than like 10 years. As part of the research on this, I just called a bunch of certification bodies and I was like, who wrote the first draft? And one of these guys was like, I wrote the first draft for Elite Certified and it was like 40 pages and it was in 1989 and he said at that point nobody cared the US Green Building Council. Okay. And then after like this like 2006, everyone was like green, green, green, things are green.

and it was a quantified way of saying what was green and then it took off. So sometimes you just have to start a thing, spend the least amount of money and go as long as you can like a glacier and eventually it will be picked up and you just have to grow mass and be very very patient. And to me a standard body is like planting a tree. You don't plant a tree and then yell at it three years later that you can't chop it down and build a house with it. [snorts] Absolutely insane. The only thing you could do that with is tumorous growth. And I don't want to make a tumor. I want to make a tumor that kills its host and makes undifferentiated random growth in a system like a piece of viral software.

I want to make a real thing. I wanted to make a glacier that carves a U-shaped dolly. I want to make a river that can be like disintermediated at every point used to make Nestle bottles of of stuff. So, here are some things that we certified. I have some of them here. But now we're accumulating cool companies like Remarkable that use like 80% recycled cobalt. That's great. Do you know how cobalt is actually mined by child labor in Congo? >> Yeah, don't look into it. Everything that you touch is Yeah, we'll leave that. Um, ThinkPad, they worked um they worked with the school of the blind to actually make tactility all over the keypads of their latest models. And so, it's a delight to use. And also, there's

a joke if somebody gives you a ThinkPad, you'll be at that job for like 20 years. And if they give you a Chromebook, you'll be there temp for six months. So both the principles in the certification can work together to create hopefully enduring, purposeful and memorable products because a person's primary task should not be computing. It should be being human. >> Y [applause] >> [applause] [applause]

>> Thank you for the coffee break. >> Um, so I have a website. It's called calm techch.institute because institutes are cool. [clears throat] >> Um, love it. It's uh it's like >> the the the um it's like almost the 10 year 10 year anniversary of the call tech book by O'Reilly because O'Reilly's cute and they have these cute animals on the front. Uh I have stickers with me if y'all want stickers. Jeff is making the shape of stickers, right? Stickers. Um it got if you speak Japanese, it's got translated in Japanese which is cool.

And then there's a designing a sound book that took me forever to write and is terrible. I mean, it's a terrible thing to write. It's okay to read. And then um you can scan these, but they're really hard to scan. Um we have this new thing where you can be a member and support the institute. It's like $50 if you're a student, 150 if you're a professional, and you get free training. Well, you get free training, pay for, but there's like all these cool training materials that you have used. and we go through the standard, we go through the certification [clears throat] and you do cool stuff and and it's nice and it's and it's fun. I wrote all the education material last week and I'm so tired. Um, but we've tested it so we're not getting untested stuff and it should be a joy.

So that is my speech and we can do some Q&A. [applause] I don't know how much time we have. >> Hello. >> Does this mic work? >> Can we turn on one more mic? Mic two. >> I turn on the mic button, but I don't know. There's another button.

Um so so thank you. This really really good uh yeah to to make us speak about all of that. Um and one of the another kind of angle of that I'd love to explore. I don't know if you get some photo I've seen that somewhere but like moving away from devices that can do everything to have singlepurpose devices so that it actually you have to have an intent that's the start of it and don't open something that then bombards you with other things that you could also be doing with that thing and then the other thing is about moving away from personal computers to collective computers like can we have instead of personal screens collective screens >> so that they are actually not trying to grab our attention necessarily but we

again same idea but trying to move from personal individual to more collective. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Great points. Yeah. Uh two points were made. One is that we should have single use objects that are fun in our environment and that it takes more information in our environments to calm us down. So put information in in a calm way. And then um in terms of like collective computing and collective interfaces at at Xerox Park there was a what Mark Mark wiser called pads tabs and boards and it was all e- in now we're just starting to get e- in that can perform um at this and like talking to e- in trying to make sure but there's um the pads tabs and boards were that

you had basically like a padshaped thing was called pad it came came out in 1968 as a piece of balsa wood that like predated the the iPad from Alan K, I think. Um, and then that was like a and then a tablet and then a big board about this size. But on this board, you could see what was going on. There would be information. Um, you could easily project. This guy Manning Chowder made this thing called a touchstone in 2008 where you could just tap your phone to this stone and it would automatically use RFID to grab the Bluetooth and you could present that way was just instant.

>> It's so cool. But then it never got made. So one of the things that made Steve Jobs really mad. So a lot of this stuff didn't get made because first in a research environment it's really fun to play with these things. Um but then secondly um we didn't get that version of the future from these papers because Mark Weiser died when he was 46 and the dominant narrative that took over was Nicholas Negroponti from MIT Media Lab which is just build stuff. Move fast and break things. Make new stuff. New is better. Make a bunch of stuff. Don't have your grandma and grandpa be able to use it. Just make new stuff. Don't make it sustainable. Don't make it useful.

It's new. It's new. It's new. It's exciting. Let's get funding from companies to be able to use that. And so I'm trying to bring back that narrative to say that like we're so constrained in what we think the future is and we're so unimaginative that we need to consider where our notion of the future is from so that we can actually imagine a real future and build it and have fun with it. The future should be fun, full of cool information. And the the idea was that you'd have these little tablets and you'd put an article on it and it'd be like two or three bucks for these eating tablets and you just hand it to somebody and be like, "Check out this article and it would be like your remarkable shaped object right there which might be a quadrinero."

>> Oh yeah. Anyway, it would look like that or smaller. Imagine that being $2 or three dollars. And then I would just give you an article. Check out this article. I'd give it to you. >> Oh yeah. This is the future. >> Look, it it isn't it isn't a giant bright blue screen and you're writing on it so you remember more. But imagine I put an article on here and I hand it to you and you put like 50 of these on your bookshelf because you like them and then you're like, "Ah, I don't like this one anymore." And you just clear it and you give it to me and it's a different article.

>> Then that's called paper. >> E paper. >> Yeah. But then the question of technology. >> Well, that's the funny thing about Xerox Park. The thing that made the future was a printer company and the future has no printers. What happened? [laughter] It's super weird, isn't it? Because if you looked at how people made things in the past or making rockets and going into space and like making architecture and making like beautiful spaces, everybody would be in a big room and they would have contacts with each other and they would have like, you know, all the all the material up on the sides of the room. Even even Apple when they made the iPhone, they made a decoy that looked like an iPhone and it was like really ugly. So everybody on

the project would carry around the real phone in a decoy and they would all complain, "Oh, I'm on this terrible project to get a bunch of like superstars from not joining and ruining the thing." And then they'd have like a war room and then in the back of that there was a secret door to the actual room where they did the the development. So sometimes you have to like decoy when you're making the future and pretend you're doing something else so that you know people don't come in and mess with it. Um but reading some of these articles is really interesting. like they're best if you read them out loud to a group. They're not best if you just like read them because they'll be like some attention grabbing thing and you'll go over to Reddit and read that instead.

But it's like if you print them out and you read them, they're super precient. Um, so that's kind of the issue is that like we were just have supposed to have lots more information, but it wasn't supposed to be bright and blue. It was supposed to be e- in. and the guy that invented e- in who's a really fun person to to talk to by the way um he he's like yeah it's taken like 24 years to have the performance because the supply chain favored the bright blue >> first so we we got this alternative feature that's actually not very good and and sometimes if you read like the history of the highway um which is called roads to power by Joe Goldie you can see that like highways went this way and then that way and then this way and then that way and there was a lot of

backstepping before the actual future settled in. That was good. And I think we're in just like one of those backwash eras of like this kind of sucks. And I want us to get out of it as soon as possible because I'm really bored of this present moment in technology. >> Thank you. You're doing God's work. >> Thank you. >> Yeah. Um, you talked a lot about lights and one thing that I find myself particularly sensitive to is the kinds of lights that we're often exposed to these days. I actually travel around with incandescent bulbs >> because I just especially if there's a CFL >> um and then now it's mostly LED and I don't hear I think a lot of people

aren't aware of how triggering those are to our nervous systems the flickering and I'm wondering if you have thoughts about that and also like the tension around like oh this is a green technology because it's using less energy but there's no awareness of how it's affecting us on earth. Yes. Okay. Who who who of you are sensitive to lights? You go into a hotel room and it's a light. Okay. Yeah. Orion is the one who introduced me to like uh flickering lights. Thank you. You've ruined my life.

>> And cheap dimming. >> Yeah. So, five ways lights are annoying. One, they're LED and super bright and they're not um they're not uh diffused. Yeah. Screen. Um, so that's annoying. It's a bright spot that's brighter than the rest of the world around it. And so you don't see the texture around the world. You're not seeing, you know, any of that. The second way lights are annoying is called color rendering index. Um, let's say there's a spectrum of 100 colors in your crayon box. And most cheap LED lights have a color rendering index of 80. So you're only getting 80 of those crayons in that box.

You're not getting a lot of the reds. So, you go into a department store and you're trying on clothes and you look like a a golem. You know, it's because 20% of those lights that that red is not there. You go into a museum or a sushi restaurant, there's these beautiful lights coming from the ceiling. Those are full spectrum lights, usually analog lights, not digital lights. There are very few companies right now that can produce 99 of those colored crayons at the California limits for energy consumption. And our next certification will be entirely about light. Um in the certification in light um we have this like it needs to have high color

rendering index. It needs to be a diffused LED. The third one that's super annoying and affects 1% of the population is called flicker-free. A lot of screens and a lot of lights that feel terrible to be under are low CRI, but they're turning on and off really fast. So, if you're in like uh like a McDonald's or something, you're getting one of those soft drinks. What's happening is there's a pulse of cool flavor and a pulse of like soda and the cup is the mixer. So, pulse, pulse, pulse, pulse really fast, and you get a soda. Unfortunately, when you're experiencing light with flicker, it's going pulse, pulse, pulse, pulse, pulse, turning on and off, and it turns on and off at a different rate if it's dim and

more if it's brighter. And your eye is the mixer. It's freaking annoying because you're experiencing this terrible thing. >> You can see that also if you go like this under the light. >> See the finger being here and then >> Yeah. Yeah. And if you do this, you can see whether something's flickering. So the way to do it, it's called pulsewidth modulation. The way to do it is to use a thing called constant circuit reduction. And I tell everybody if you have flicker-free or super high flicker that's better for your eyes, label on the product and you will get a point in context certified. If you don't, you should work with an engineer, which I

have one on staff that will work with you to very cheaply and very effectively make a constant circle reduction. So, [clears throat] all the lights and platforms and stuff that we certify are either e- in which doesn't have flicker or has a weird kind of flicker, but it's not bad for your eyes, or is a infinite dimmer light that's either incandescent, high color rendering index, and flicker-free. So, it's like I'm really sensitive to this and I also carry around incandescent bulbs a lot or eye masks and stuff like that and you can actually see it. Like people will fight in an apartment with an o a big overhead light that's crappy. It makes everything seem horrible and a really beautiful light like we had in the past which was

either a fireplace or a candle or the actual light, not a street light outside that's flickering at you and is in a in a terrible color temperature. So, we see this at the bar. That light is not terribly filtered and can be really bright and feels like really soulless. It's 5600 Kelvin. It's kind of blue and white. And then you can turn it down to like 3,400 Kelvin, which is like a nice warm. And it really depends on what you're doing. Um, so you can have these like nice warm light. Anyway, light's a whole topic. We care about it super ridiculously deeply. I hate it all.

Thanks, Ryan. You're great. Um, so, so just because in 1995 it became cheap to make blue LEDs or whatever doesn't mean that we should tolerate shitty light in our environments. It's making the world less romantic. And our world is already not romantic. We're already kind of being factory farmed with our brains. Let's at least have some humanity in our experience and make it a little [cough] [clears throat] >> And it puts you on edge because it affects your nervous system. >> Yeah, it affects your nervous system and you make more mistakes. Um, so, so I'll go to um big companies and I'll be like, "Did you know if you have more natural light and flicker-free lights, you're going to have less error rate and it will pay for itself in two months." So,

yeah, [clears throat] >> I don't know that much, but >> I don't work. >> Is that on? Yeah. So I don't I don't work in design but I you know know about built-in obsolescence and do you do you see that now in all your work you see that's getting worse or better and also this ide slow design because these objects that you've got up there they just look robust taking time it's slower and that has an effect now you feel it so >> just built up so >> yeah yeah >> great questions um what I want to show

to companies is that you you can be like a German middle class company which means you can have the same familyrun non uh non-publicly traded nonBC funded company and it can help your community and be useful for hundreds of years like it's do this in Japan too like go hang out with a village that makes ceramics for 800 years they're having a great time it's pretty awesome right and and we we can also you know we can idealize these things too. But the idea of like a stock market, publicly traded company, advertising based companies is relatively new.

I would just call it you're at business if you have to use ads or or in doing shitification or do a subscription to make Grand Theft Auto 6 or whatever. It's just you're at business. Like I don't think you're good at business if you have to do that. I'm sorry. It's just stupid. What did you learn in business school? You went to business school for how long to make something that sucks and you get like two or three good years out of it before you've like sucked all the marrow out of the bones and left it bleached on the sand of our consciousness? Like you, >> stupid.

>> Yeah. So, I I don't know. I don't I think that there's another way. And me on it is not very nice. I'm sorry to all of you publicly traded companies out there who all apologize to me in private and say we shouldn't have done this. Now we have to make shittier stuff. You know, there's always idealism when you do the company and you should like I didn't have to raise VC for this thing. It makes a an amount that survives, right? And I think this is the big issue is that we're in such a rush to make something so quickly that we forget what it's like to make something really good.

You don't need a lot of advertising spend. People will pay more for something. It's but it's boring. You know, you're not going to get in the news for, you know, taking out a $20 million loan to buy a banana. Oh, no. That's what I feel like VC. And I've raised VC. It's not like I haven't done the dog in a pony show. But, you know, we we sold to a privately held company because they're really good at making software that lasts forever and almost every state department has to use it to maintain their roads. If they went public, it would be really bad for everyone and our roads. Like, let's not do that. So, I think the narratives in general are that things should be a certain way, but they they don't have to

be that way. It's just the dominant narrative. science fiction this and this and this and all we have to do is offroad our minds and be like there's different ways to think where did I come up with that thought why do I have to do it this way so yeah okay there um I'm a bit of a colleague in this been studying design and uh being obsessed with this kind of things the last 20 years um a question that maybe I know it's delicate maybe will be another certification but what about the material sign to credle or sustainability is that in some way

related >> and also another question about maybe it's a bit lateral but still with the co cognitive weight u on software >> do you have something on that. >> Okay. >> Okay. Great, great questions. Um, >> great. First one was what? >> The cradle to cradle. >> Okay. So, in our materials category, we have a sustainability initiative. We just don't say it's cradle to cradle or sustainable. we just say the ingredients that products have if they are which is a roundabout way of [snorts]

um preventing people from marketing themselves as sustainable and not being sustainable. So if you if you have one of those certifications already then you get a point. Um, but what I learned with lead certified was that it didn't say you need to have a good HVAC system, a good air conditioning system, good whatever. [clears throat] They said that the CO2 in the room should not be more than 100 ppm uh of the average of the outside which measured it and then you could you could be creative in how you got there. So we tried to be like use of recyclable materials like use of like it's not necessarily that like Remarkable might fit cradle to cradle and fulfill the

restraints of what they need to be as a business, but if they're reducing child labor in their products by 80% by using recycled cobalt, they're doing something quite good. So, it's something I worked on for like 6 months, I was like, ah, like how we actually do it in a way that people can't get around it and they can brag about it if they do a good job. Um, and so I like I like creative cradle. I like beat corpse. I like all these things, but they're also sometimes so um advertised that sometimes they lose their meaning. And I want to certify the the data and the process behind that so that even if that meaning changes and those projects get diluted, there will

still be the thing behind the scenes that they need to care about. It's like my anti-corruption policy, I guess. Um and then the second one was software. So right now we certify spaces, physical spaces like hotel rooms and installations of trade shows and we do hardware. And the reason is because both of these things are physical objects. And every time we get people who want us to do software certification with the exception of one group have software that's really awesome that we certified.

Um it's like I've used AI to do this and they're really pushy, really crazy. Um and so Oh, there's a sticky note. Sorry. Um so so the the main issue is that um what we're going to do probably for software certification is we'll give away five free or maybe one free software certification a year and it's going to have to go to like win app you know >> because most software does not will not like we're working with a big software company right now and I don't know if they'll pass um and it's a really big one. And so the issue is that like

because the buttons can change around because the the software update did they go through a reertification process every time they do a bug fix. It's incredibly horrible [clears throat] and a lot of the software engineers don't have control over it. Some VP that comes in last minute and says, "Well, this doesn't look this way, so we're going to change it." Then they'll lose their certification. So also like the funding in that space is weird, too. like software doesn't really want to be column text certified. A few of it does, but because they're venturebacked mostly, they have to they they they will be forced to not be. So we be like this year it's this and there's a bunch of independent software out there that's really awesome >> and we will find it and we will certify

it >> and it'll be something that still works on your Mac or PC even if the company goes out of business. It will be something like Ableton Music Software. >> The other guide. >> Yeah. Yeah, we have a guide for that. Yeah, I I wrote I wrote the guide and Yeah, I don't want to release it to people yet. I'm not sure how to release it to people, like make it public. I might I might want to do it as a training program. So, be like, "Here's your software certification training program guide." and you can go through the educational material and have a quiz after each one so somebody just can't like copy it out and then pretend that they that they did it. Um, but yeah, I

want it to be there. [snorts] It's [clears throat] just horrible. Software is in such a bad shape right now because it's subscription based. Like you're not you won't get it. You will not get certified if you're subscription based because you don't own it. Sorry. [applause] Um, we do have a few more minutes. Um, we could we have 10 more minutes if we want to. >> It's ready, but >> Oh, nice. Um, I I think before you all leave, give the mic to DEA to introduce the tech track Star Trek.

>> Thank you so much, James. Oh, thank you. Thank you for the work that you're doing. I also for the I feel like historians will say that we are all junkies >> and hoarders. Yeah. >> Yeah. And I feel like what you're doing is kind of introducing um a new element into the mix that shifts the game theoretically. It's incentive. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You got it. Yeah.

might be. So, um, okay, about the tech track, I realized that it's been very hard to decide what to do between the various tracks. So, the tech track is not going to be 2:30 to 6:30 anymore. Uh, all the information is out on the whiteboard. It will be made of two sides, a learning site and a building side. For the learning side, it's literally whatever you want to learn, please add it. Add your name to the whiteboard. What we'll do is we'll find someone who can uh mentor or tutor you through that topic. Obviously, like most of them are topics that require a long

time. So, it might be a prime or an introduction to it. Um, and you can also add any topic to that. As for the >> Sorry, Chinese updates. >> Huh? >> Chinese updates. [laughter] >> Okay. >> What time is the learning happening? >> What? What time is the what >> the learning happening? What's >> the learning is going to be on a bespoke basis. So, you add your name and a topic on there. What I'm going to do is figure out exactly who is going to teach. Then I'm going we're going to figure out a time >> for it and announce it so that anyone else can join. I would encourage if you

want to learn something to put it up on the whiteboard because if you do then the learning will be bespoke specifically to your case which is more useful than if you just join in later. the building side. Instead, there is uh a core uh uh project that is going to go for the four weeks which is to build the first version of an operating system for the valley that is an agentic system local first uh that is uh meant to help people running this place into the future. And you you you can feel free to participate in building

any part of that. But also once we have the infrastructure foundations to build any feature on top of it, right? So some people have already started thinking like oh let's switch the the the kitchen roas uh to to having on the app or like maybe we want the calendar on there or whatever you can think of. It's free rain. But if you want to build something that does not fit into something that might go into this system, that's also by all means not only but encourage reach out if you're looking for collaborators or if you're looking for mentors to help you with it. So again, all the

information is on there. I'm DEA. My Telegram is DEA12X. Everything is written on the whiteboard, including my handle. So uh yeah >> what's the time for the building? So for the building there is no time again there is only one meeting that you should pay attention to 2 to 2:30 Monday to Friday every day it will it's just going to be a coordination meeting about what everyone has built what everyone's going to build and perhaps we're going to look at having uh demo days but for now this is the structure there the the only time is the 2 to 230 coordination Good. [applause] >> Food is ready.

>> Thank you. There.