The spirit of Calm Technology lies in the fact that while the information is there as it is, we can change our way of dealing with it and therefore achieve something. In the driving example, Weiser et al. put the road, radio and passenger as the "center" while the noise of the car the "periphery". Judged from a non-human perspective, there is no essential difference between the road, the radio, the passenger and the noise of the car - they are merely, information. But we are able to receive all this in the center-periphery way so that we can drive smoothly and be alerted when something goes wrong.
When designing certain technology, we tend to have one single level of interaction. For example, "when users approach the display, they can use specific gestures to select certain item". For another example, we have a (growing) number of menus and panels in software like Photoshop, media player, etc where users are most likely to be overwhelmed. For a third example, map systems offer us more and more detailed and sophisticated view of maps where all we want to find might just be a route between two points. All these examples are related to some sorts of information overload. And supposedly Calm Technology aims at solving this.
To end this post, there is something in InfoVis which is similar to Calm Technology. It's called "Focus+Context" where the center of users' attention is highlighted and the surrounding area fades as it goes farther from the center. The user can concentrate on the center while keeping an eye on the surroundings.
