[Sound: Applause.] [Visual: A woman with short, curly red hair walks toward a stage.] [Visual: An audience claps.] [Visual: The woman smiles and walks onto a stage in front of a screen. Text on screen: "reMarkable"] [Visual: Text appears on screen: "Amber Case. Design advocate, speaker, researcher, author."] [Visual: Wide shot of Amber Case on stage in front of a seated audience. A slide is on the screen behind her. Title on slide: "Texture, Environment and Calm Technology"] Amber Case: Thank you so much. It's an honor to be here. My name is Amber Case and I am the founder of the Calm Tech Institute. [Visual: The slide changes to show the Calm Tech Institute logo, with "CTI" inside a rounded rectangle and the words "Calm Tech INSTITUTE" next to it.] Amber Case: We're the first standards body that looks at how much attention technology takes from your experience of being human. And we reward companies that make tech that makes a better use of your attention, allows you to be more human. Today I'm going to talk about texture and cognition and how the invisible things in our environment affect us more than we expect. So I'd like to ask you all a question about how has design changed over time? [Visual: The slide changes. Text on slide: "How has design changed over time?"] Amber Case: What are some of the trends that we've been seeing in our own lives and our own environments? It's not just about the tech we have in our pockets, but the tech that we're surrounded by. I feel we're experiencing a loss of dimensionality. [Visual: Slide changes to black background. Text appears: "We're experiencing a loss of dimensionality". The word "dimensionality" is purple.] Amber Case: And that means that we're losing texture. [Visual: Text on slide changes. "dimensionality" becomes "texture". The word "texture" is green.] Amber Case: We're losing color especially. [Visual: Text on slide changes. "texture" becomes "color". The word "color" is multi-colored.] Amber Case: And you might have seen this go around the web, but this chart of car colors by year is very interesting because it shows especially in the United States, there were many car colors and then they started to converge on gray and white and black and a little bit of blue and a little bit of red. [Visual: Slide shows a stacked bar chart titled "CAR COLORS BY YEAR". The x-axis is "Year of production" from 1990 to 2020. The y-axis is a percentage. The top portion of the bars shows a variety of colors which diminish over the years. The bottom portion shows white, silver, gray, and black, which grow to dominate the chart by 2020.] Amber Case: What this means is that the average car parking lot is starting to look like this instead of this vibrant jungle of interesting colors and shapes and ideas. [Visual: Slide shows a parking lot full of cars that are mostly white, gray, silver, and black.] Amber Case: It also makes it really hard to find your car at night if everything starts to look the same. But more importantly, I feel that everything has gone flat. [Visual: Slide shows text: "Everything has gone FLAT"] Amber Case: What does that mean? It means that many of the surfaces we touch and look at are devoid of texture and life. They've become gray and a lot of our experiences have gone behind glass in this little cage that represents very brittly what we used to experience in full dimension. Especially cars. Many new cars have these exciting touchscreens. [Visual: Slide splits into two images. Left: a car's center console with physical buttons and dials. Right: a person's finger touching a large, futuristic touchscreen in a car.] Amber Case: But because they're a touchscreen, you don't get to have the relationship and the feeling and the meaning that you might have with a trusted car in the past, where you know exactly where the radio dial is. And there are small ridges so that you can find it with your hand. That you know where all the different radio buttons are and there's little raised dots on them so that you can look in front of you when you're driving and you don't have to stop talking to somebody else to say, I'm sorry, there was a software update and I no longer know where the windshield wipers are on the car that I've owned for the last three years. Technology should get more familiar with time instead of less familiar. It should become something that you can enjoy doing something else while you're using. Like a trusted radio so that you can sit there and paint or stare out the window. Many of us can have a conversation while we're driving a car, but we can't have one while we're using an automated checkout system at a grocery store in which the labor is offloaded to us. So if you've heard of Dieter Rams, he did a lot of work for Bosch. [Visual: Slide titled "Dieter Rams Industrial Minimalism". It shows a photo of Dieter Rams at his desk with his designs. Another image shows a white record player. Another image compares the calculator on an early iPhone to a physical Braun calculator.] Amber Case: This is a a beautiful, minimalistic industrial design. It's it's gorgeous to use, provided you're using the physical objects because there are raised buttons and there are there's a restrained design. Here's this Braun calculator and it has these little nuanced raised buttons and there's beautiful colors so you can locate with your eye out of the corner of your eye how to use this calculator. But when you ensconce this behind glass, like Apple did, you for a while had some texture and some interest and now a lot of the design behind glass is extremely flat. [Visual: Slide changes to show four white products by Dieter Rams: a shaver, a juicer, a radio, and a calculator.] Amber Case: Here's some really fun products that people use that still work today. [Visual: Slide changes to show the cover of the book "Soft Electronics," an orange hairdryer, and the packaging for a food processor and an egg cooker.] Amber Case: And there's a great book you can read called Soft Electronics, which is one of my favorite books. It goes through the history of all the kitchen appliances and weird things that you can use to curl your hair that are fun and friendly and colorful and delightful, not just millennial gray. [Visual: Slide with black background and white text: "Distracted driving is literally a loss of touch".] Amber Case: Distracted driving is literally this loss of touch, this loss of texture. [Visual: Slide reappears showing the comparison between a car console with physical buttons and one with a touchscreen. The text "Distracted driving is literally loss of touch" is superimposed.] Amber Case: But when we think about how that works in a lot of our environments, there's a lot more distraction that's happening just because the mind is expecting texture, it's expecting input, it's expecting life, dimensionality and color. And when we walk into an environment with less of that, the mind says, "I'm expecting something." In the jungle, there's so much life that the mind says, "Wow, this is great. I can thrive here." But when all of that's taken away, the mind goes, "I'm expecting something. Can I live here? Is there anything alive here?" And there's an unsettling feeling of being in this kind of non-place where you don't have any identity or relation or history. [Visual: Slide with black background and white text: "Our hands have eyes, too!"] Amber Case: And our hands have eyes, too. So much of tech right now is excited about the eyes. It looks really cool, it's exciting, it looks beautiful in an ad. And then when you take it home, it's not a very good roommate. It doesn't feel good to use. It doesn't feel delightful. It doesn't become part of our lives in a way that a family dog or a beloved couch might become. [Visual: Slide shows a person's hands holding up a swatch of pink, textured fabric from a book of fabric samples.] Amber Case: I'm just thinking about all the different times that you might touch different textures and what that feels like and what that means. If you're a child and you have your first baby blanket, the texture of that blanket has meaning to you. And if you touch it 20 years later, there's a feeling that you get once more of nostalgia. That part of your mind is getting stimulated to say, "Oh, I remember this. This is so special to me." And we can bring that through in materials all over the place. [Visual: Slide titled "Every Thing We Touch, A 24-Hour Inventory of Our Lives, Archive Photos by Paula Zuccotti 2013-2019". It shows dozens of items neatly arranged.] Amber Case: One of my favorite people is Paula Zuccotti, and she made this beautiful photo essay as an anthropologist called "Everything We Touch." It was a 24-hour understanding of everything somebody touched in their lives. And she went all over the world and put down a big piece of paper and took everything that someone touched and took a photo of it. And you can see what people are touching in the morning, what people are touching at night. And I thought maybe there should be an edit to this. [Visual: An image of a smartphone is superimposed over the previous slide, covering many of the physical objects.] Amber Case: What you touch based on the time of day, but the size of the object is how much you touch it and how much of what we touch has become glass. I think a lot about walking dogs. When I wrote my thesis on the iPhone in 2007, when it first came out, I was watching business people in San Francisco walk their dogs with the new iPhone. And for the very first time, instead of a a BlackBerry where you could type without looking, I saw people put their dogs on pause because they had to look at the screen. And so they stopped on the hill while they were walking their dog and the dog looked up at them and said, "What's going on?" And I was watching dogs acclimate to a new human experience through the dog's perspective. I also thought, why are you taking your dog out to walk in the first place? And very much, it's about a dog's own need for a social network of updates. [Visual: A white dog sniffs at some green plants on a sidewalk. Social media icons are superimposed over the plants.] Amber Case: Everything they're smelling in the environment is about status updates. "Here's where this dog was, here's what this dog did. Here's a new smell. Here's an angry smell because I'm mad at that dog because they got there before I got there. Now let me mask that scent with my scent." It's it's always about what do people want to do in the morning a thousand years ago. You wake up and you understand what's in your environment. What's new? Because what's new is about making sure that you survive. What's new? What's a new indicator plant to tell me the pH of the soil so I know that it's a certain time of year to plant something else. What about the tracks of an animal? Our minds are developed to really, really understand all this tiny little difference and basically read the news in the morning. But when the news comes behind glass and it's everything in the world when you wake up, you want to get this information, but your thoughts aren't your own. You're not looking at your local environment, you're looking at a global, very sugary, processed environment and it's not the same. And so if we go on a walk, we get to be like these dogs and sniff the original social network update of what's going on in nature. [Visual: The reMarkable logo appears on the screen, then the video fades to black and ends.]