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Amber Case          

Cyborg Anthropologist & Founder of Geoloqi, Inc.

Amber Case studies the interaction between humans and computers and how our relationship with information is changing the way cultures think, act, and understand their worlds.

Case is the author of Calm Technology, Design for the Next Generation of Devices, and Designing with Sound. She believes that we need smarter people, not smarter technology, and that technology should empower people to have more time for creativity, culture, and innovation.

Case speaks and consults globally with Fortune 500 companies on creating technologies that work alongside humans. Her topics include Calm Technology, user experience, artificial intelligence and the next generation of automation.

Case spent two years at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society and as a visiting researcher at MIT’s Center for Civic Media. She spoke about the future of the interface for SXSW 2012’s keynote address, and her TED talk, “We are all cyborgs now,” has been viewed over a million times.

She’s been listed among Inc. Magazine’s 30 under 30 and featured among Fast Company’s Most Influential Women in Technology. She was named a National Geographic Emerging Explorer in 2014. She was the co-founder and former CEO of Geoloqi, a location-based software company acquired by Esri in 2012. In 2016, Case was awarded the Bell Labs Shannon Visionary Award in 2016 for her work on Calm Tech.

Speech Topics

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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