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Amber Case          

Cyborg Anthropologist & Founder of Geoloqi, Inc.

Amber Case is an internationally recognized design advocate and speaker, and the author of four books, including Calm Technology and A Kids Book About Technology. She spent two years as a fellow at MIT’s Center for Civic Media and Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society and was a 2021 Mozilla Fellow working on the future of money, alternative business models for the web and creator compensation.

Named one of Inc. Magazine’s 30 under 30 and Fast Company’s Most Influential Women in Technology, she was named a National Geographic Emerging Explorer in 2012 and received the Claude Shannon Innovation Award from Bell Labs. She was the co-founder and CEO of Geoloqi, a location-based software company acquired by Esri. Amber Case studies the interaction between humans and computers and how technology is changing everyday life.

Case is currently the co-founder of DAO DAO, a online governance tool that lets communities build and operate DAOs with a visual interface. DAO DAO is designed as a set of composable components that can snap together like Lego blocks. Communities can pick and choose pre-built governance components to build a system that work well for them, or they can program their own.

A TED speaker and author, Case enjoys meeting and interacting with interesting audiences all over the world. Her speeches range from the future of technology, the future of money, and how to design products at Human Scale.

Speech Topics


Future of the web/browsers, web economics (blockchain, bitcoin, decentralized finance)

Calm Technology

Cyborg Anthropology

Designing Calm Technology

Our world is made of information that competes for our attention. What is needed? What is not? We cannot interact with our everyday life in the same way we interact with a desktop computer. The terms calm computing and calm technology were coined in 1995 by PARC Researchers Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown in reaction to the increasing complexities that information technologies were creating. Calm technology describes a state of technological maturity where a user’s primary task is not computing, but being human. The idea behind Calm Technology is to have smarter people, not things. Technology shouldn’t require all of our attention, just some of it, and only when necessary.

How can our devices take advantage of location, proximity and haptics to help improve our lives instead of get in the way? How can designers can make apps “ambient” while respecting privacy and security? This talk will cover how to use principles of Calm Technology to design the next generation of connected devices. We’ll look at notification styles, compressing information into other senses, and designing for the least amount of cognitive overhead.

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