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 …

Very Slow Movie Player is a cool experiment: an e-ink picture frame that plays a movie not at 24 frames per second, but at 24 frames per hour. This inverts the normal movie-watching experience. The rhythm is flipped, and it presents interesting thoughts on the speed of technology and the attention it demands. The author discusses some interesting implications of the use of slowly-changing e-ink displays in public spaces: a calmer alternative to LED screens (as in bus stops), or as an ornamental way to blend our digital lives into our physical ones (buildings whose appearance change over the course of days, or in response to their environment). But beside being a provocative prototype of calm or slow technology, the Very Slow Movie Player …