The Lost Discipline of the Alarm: What Notification Design Forgot

Notification design has a problem it did not invent and has never named. The problem is alarms: which signals deserve to interrupt a person, and which should be kept quiet. And it was diagnosed, with a whole discipline built around it, long before a single app ever buzzed in your pocket, in oil refineries, nuclear control rooms and hospital wards.

Your phone has never met that discipline. It built one channel, called everything an alarm, and left you to sort out the noise. This is the story of the knowledge that was lost on the way into your pocket, and of who really decides what reaches you.

FURTHER READING

• The explosion and fires at the Texaco Refinery, Milford Haven. 24th July 1994

• HSE, Better Alarm Handling (CHIS6)

• EEMUA Publication 191, Alarm Systems

• Joint Commission, Sentinel Event Alert 50: Medical Device Alarm Safety (2013)

• Sorkin, Why are people turning off our alarms? (1988)

• Simon, Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World (1971)

• McFarlane, Coordinating the Interruption of People in HCI

• Horvitz, Principles of Mixed-Initiative User Interfaces (1999)

• Weiser and Brown, Designing Calm Technology (1995-96)

• Fitz et al., Batching smartphone notifications can improve well-being (2019)

• Push notification benchmarks, via Business of Apps

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