I came across this great interview with Evie Powell, lead UX designer at Proprio. They're creating a surgical imaging platform, that generates real-time, high-fidelity 3D VR views of surgical environments. These VR views can then be complemented with relevant information on an as-you-need basis. This is where the "calm design" smarts of Proprio come in. Rather than bombarding the users with a dashboard of statistics (which would quickly lead to information overload), Evie argues for a different approach:

What you want is a system that takes in all this visual information and smartly displays it to you based on when it’s most relevant. So if the surgeon is looking at the patient, they probably want patient-relevant data. If they’re spending a lot of time looking at their hand tool, it might be that the tool is faulty and they’re looking for diagnostic information about the tool. So that’s how we’re thinking of UX design. When can I actually be useful? When should I be in the forefront, and when should I get out of the way? It’s very important that our system is able to do both intelligently.

With her background in socially pervasive game experiences (PhD dissertation), and natural user interfaces (working on the Kinect at Microsoft), she sets out an inspiringly grand vision of the future of computing:

Think about how you would want to interact with information in the future and what would make you want to turn it off. If we can design across the spectrum from low user engagement to high user engagement, we can create tools that help us when we’re not even really thinking about the fact that we might need help, or that can transform the way we interact with other people.