Calm Design for Critical Situations
- Amber Case
- 13 minutes ago
- 6 min read
Applying Calm Technology™ principles to the world’s most stressful jobs
The bridge of an ocean-going ship can be one of the calmest or most hectic environments on earth. The vast majority of any ocean voyage—whether it’s a cruise ship, a container vessel, or a destroyer doing the voyaging—is spent calmly traveling in straight lines. Practiced protocols govern most crew actions as they monitor a wide range of indicators, establishing a routine that can gradually drift into monotony.
Then there are brief periods, lasting a few seconds to a few hours, where total focus and immediate action are needed to prevent disaster. Some of these situations can be anticipated, others only prepared for. Extensive training, study and simulation go into familiarizing sailors and mariners with predictable high-stakes situations like port pilotage and collision avoidance; even more goes into sharpening their responses when weather, equipment failure, marine traffic, or military conflict create true emergencies.
When I talk with people about Calm Technology™ as a concept, they tend to think of the first type of situation: technology minimizing stress when none is called for, and assisting rather than interfering with routine tasks. But it’s the second situation where calm tech has the most to offer.
It’s not you, it’s the interface
Many kinds of military and professional training emphasize making good decisions in stressful situations. We all experience the fight-or-flight response when faced with danger or stress, but a well-trained soldier or sailor can channel this into focused, rational action: moving a squad toward the sound of gunfire, for example, or calmly ordering emergency measures when a crew member goes overboard.
But every trained response has its limits, and the technology used in these environments can dramatically shift those limits. Many high-stakes jobs—military and maritime, but also aviation, medical, power plant control, and emergency response—are also data-intensive jobs. The console on a ship’s bridge and the alarms that fill an emergency room have the capacity to inform and alert, but also to distract and distress.
…many interfaces are still designed to specifications that take a “better safe than sorry” approach, making cascading alerts all but inevitable.
The “cascading alarm” situation is a well-known example of technology making a bad situation worse. The well-known nuclear accident at Three Mile Island (TMI) was caused in part by an overlapping series of alarms: according to a post-incident report, “a majority” of the roughly 750 alarm annunciators in the control room were triggered at one point. It’s hard to imagine anyone, no matter how well-trained, making optimal decisions with that kind of conflicting input.
When pilots and nurses mentally “triage” alarms, it’s often because so many are acting at once that triage is the only way to maintain the focus demanded by their primary tasks. One study found that veteran nurses take longer to respond to hospital alarms than rookies, having learned to tune many of them out.
It’s tempting to blame these kinds of behaviors on human negligence. But there are clear principles of good interface design being violated in many such scenarios. Frameworks like HURID and SAFEMODE have made great strides towards identifying the factors that can contribute to “human error” in high-stakes jobs, including (critically) cultural factors. But many interfaces are still designed to specifications that take a “better safe than sorry” approach, making cascading alerts all but inevitable. A calm tech perspective offers a useful alternative.
Calm in the eye of the storm
Of the eight Principles of Calm Technology™, three in particular are worth exploring in the context of high-stakes/high-stress decision making.
Principle I: Technology should require the smallest possible amount of attention
The first thing a civilian is likely to notice upon sticking their head into a commercial or military aircraft cockpit is the immense detail and the prevalence of analog interfaces. Dozens of knobs, buttons and switches, dials with physical hands, numeric readouts that physically scroll—it’s as if the smartphone had never existed. Newer aircraft incorporate more digital displays, but these are often closely modeled on their analog predecessors.
Why?
One of the touchscreen’s great advantages is how efficiently it uses space. One screen can become anything, from a keyboard to a puzzle game to a graph of today’s stock market. But this variability adds cognitive load: every time we look at a touchscreen, we must briefly scan and assess it, categorize what we’re seeing, and then decide where to focus. For an operator in a fight-or-flight mindset, this can be disastrous.
This is a form of technological calm, using persistent physical location and format to create meaning and allow the operator to sublimate a task to peripheral attention.
Analog interfaces are both immobile and tactile. After practicing on one, pilots develop muscle memory that enables them to gather data and act with incredible speed and little effort. You don’t think about the shape of each letter when hand-writing a note; they don’t think about the location of a readout or the gesture needed to trigger a needed function. In both cases, decision is nearly equivalent with action.
This is a form of technological calm, using persistent physical location and format to create meaning and allow the operator to sublimate a task to peripheral attention. High-stakes interfaces need more of that.
Principle II: Technology should inform and create calm
Half of interface design—arguably the more important half—concerns conveying information to the user. With alarms, that information is often a single bit: “an emergency requires your attention”. Most buzzers, sirens, and bells fit in this category, demanding that we stop what we’re doing and address the emergency.
From a calm tech perspective, this presents two problems. First, it’s context insensitive, demanding full attention in all cases. Nurses triage alarms because they know that not every one of them requires immediate response, but most alarms are designed as if they do.
Second, there’s a missed opportunity in conveying so little information. In the modern era, where a thumb-sized device can create essentially any sound, there’s no reason for an audible alert to communicate just one bit of data, especially if a more informative sound could remove the need to gather more information.
Proximity alerts on newer cars are a good example of a “multi-bit” approach. Early versions were one-bit, beeping when you got too close to something, but requiring you to look around and figure out where. Today’s alerts use different tones for front and rear proximity, and often beep a staccato pattern that quickens as the distance shortens. These are usually paired with a visual indicator, but a driver who’s used to the car can often learn everything they need from sound alone, allowing them to stay focused on the delicate task of maneuvering into a tight parking space.
In high-stress environments, this presents opportunities for reducing cognitive load. Tone, pattern, and loudness can say plenty, and when well designed, audible alerts can overlap without getting obscured or increasing stress. A life-or-death alert can still be a single loud buzzer…but perhaps let’s leave that to actual life-or-death situations.
Principle III: Technology should make use of the periphery
The examples above also touch on a third principle: not all information needs to be front-and-center in order to be useful.
Humans have evolved over thousands of generations to process huge amounts of information at once. Think of a hunter walking through a forest, casually taking stock of the sounds of birds and wind, movement in their peripheral vision, obstacles visible in the path ahead. Instead of stressful, this is highly focused, with the dozens of peripheral indicators forming a baseline from which even small deviations can be quickly detected. Mark Weiser, in his early work on calm tech at Xerox PARC, noted that a forest presents just as much information density as a hectic city, yet is seen as soothing rather than distressing. Our ability to process the forest’s input peripherally is the main reason why.
The solution is not to remove or weaken regulations, but to elevate cognitive calm as a critical safety measure…
In order to take full advantage of an operator’s periphery, it’s crucial to understand modes of information processing that don’t start with a number, graph, indicator, or image that sits in the center of the field of view. Some of this already happens as a matter of course: the bridge crew subconsciously monitors engine noise, the nurse knows the pattern of sounds that indicate a smoothly running ward, and so on.
Our capacity for peripheral processing is vast and underexploited. An interface that supports the clearest decision-making in the most stressful situation will be one that matches the importance and type of information to the right channel, whether that’s visual or audible, dynamic or static, peripheral or central.
Calmer minds, safer systems
The key to applying these principles to real control environments is the careful matching of information to format. But high-stakes environments are tightly regulated—with good reason—and regulated systems can be inflexible. It’s ironic that the regulatory frameworks put in place to make these kinds of jobs safer can in fact make them more dangerous, by forcing interfaces that obscure information and heighten stress.
The solution is not to remove or weaken those regulations, but to elevate cognitive calm as a critical safety measure, as important as redundancy and systematic review. An environment that promotes calm, it turns out, isn’t just a way of making the routine tasks of everyday life less stressful. It’s also a key factor in keeping us safe.