Welcome to a six post series on the Calm Tech Institute’s certification standards! In this final post of the series, we’ll focus on material, which is featured in Section 6 of the Calm Tech Certified™ program.
I’ve found that after a short nature hike, I’m far less interested in whatever digital content I was looking at beforehand. You might have experienced this yourself when walking through the forest, then coming back to feel noticeably clear-headed afterwards.
Why is that? The mental effects of taking a walk in nature is not simply a matter of the fresh air, sounds of nature, and sunlight. As University of Oregon physicist Richard Taylor work recently demonstrated, we also prefer the sight of the natural world on a mathematical level. One of the major reasons for this is fractals.
Fractals are patterns that self-repeat at different scales, and they can be found all over nature in objects like trees, rivers, clouds and coastlines… And the response is a positive one. Humans experience less stress and better well-being when looking at nature, and this is driven by fractals.
“The human brain would rather look at nature than city streets,” Taylor and his team reported in 2022.
Calm Technology operates from a similar premise, that there’s just as much information in a forest as in a city, but one of them calms us and the other stresses us – the difference is in how the information is communicated. In this, we can learn much from the texture, color and the other materials of nature.
One of the reasons why modern architecture and spaces can be anxiety-producing is the lack of fractals in modern architecture and spaces.
There’s even more to this phenomenon: It turns out that the mind is specifically set up to “calm down” with more information, not less.
When we put people in environments with less information – perfect steel walls and escalator conveyor belts, and machined environments that are larger and sterile, like a high rise construction without any texture or character– the mind feels tense. While in them, we miss important parts of human experience. We thrive with a multi-varied cascade of information, like in nature, but don’t get it in most of our constructed spaces. So there’s a sense of unease.
Our dogs, trapped indoors in relatively monotonous rooms most of the day, are overjoyed to go on outdoor walks and see “updates” from other dogs in their environment. Our minds need to do that too.
Putting the Power of Materials into Practice
Taylor's team found that fractals were able to reduce stress and mental fatigue for the observer by as much as 60 percent – and that hospitalized patients were able to recover faster when they were able to look out a window and see the fractals of nature outside.
I spend a lot of time traveling, and relaxing in airport lounges is one of my only respites from the stress of airports. The calming effect can happen in human-made spaces, provided the designers keep some details in mind.
In the best-designed lounges, I can actually feel myself de-stressing from travel. But the best lounges are not necessarily the fanciest or most exclusive, In a lot of cases, it comes down to texture.
Most airports are designed as “pass through spaces” where you move through a non-place without identity, relation, or history. There are underground walkways, elevators with smooth steel, and endless conveyor belts and people movers.
But the best airline lounges are full of natural textures, with furniture with wooden and stone surfaces, and rooms even lined with flowers, trees, and fountains. These calming lounges, in other words, have materials full of fractals.
Artists applied this knowledge to build an incredibly beautiful installation in an airport, one of the most non-place places in our lives.
If you're lucky enough to visit Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, you might find yourself in a special art installation embedded into an underground walkway that connects concourses.
“'Flight Paths', an environmental installation by artist Steve Waldeck, with a simulated tree canopy, the sound of bird calls, and diffuse light (as if coming through spaces in branches and leaves) is designed to give travelers the feeling of moving through a forest.
While simulating a forest is not very practical in most spaces, it’s still possible to leverage the power of fractals in more subtle ways. In another project, Taylor collaborated with UO psychologist Margaret Sereno and architect Ihab Elzeyadi to design fractal-patterned carpets for workplaces, schools, airports and other contexts where people experience heightened anxiety.
Taylor’s carpeting project infuses more natural fractals and patterns into materials in “non-places” like airports (where people are more likely to experience anxiety) in order to calm people down.
Materials and Calm Tech Certification
Much of our current technology looks like an alien species dropped into the modern environment. Remove televisions, smartphones, and a few other objects from our homes, and you’ll find that most everything else was designed in the 50s and 60s. (But even the iPhone was inspired by mid-century designer Dieter Rams.)
All of this is why Calm Tech Certified’s Section 6 process focuses on materials that go into a product’s design. For instance:
Use of Inert materials: Inert materials do not cause outgassing. Touchable surfaces should use inert materials, such as glass, silicone, high quality ABS plastic or hard metals for 50% or more of the product line.
Use of natural materials: Wood, straw, fabric, leather recommended. All of them develop a patina or character over time, like an old wood floor.
Aesthetic integration with common interior environments: Device should use materials and design elements that harmonize with common interior environments and are visually unobtrusive.
There are so many opportunities for a new generation of design leadership that infuses natural materials, patterns and textures into everyday electronics. That way, our products will start looking less like tools of an alien species, blend better with our lives – and are imbued with the fractals from nature that we truly need.
Read the rest of this series:
Part 6: Sensory Starvation: Why Our Brains Crave Natural Materials (you are here)