The Challenges User-Aware Platform Technologies

In his keynote at the Fall 2005 Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, Justin Rattner, Intel senior fellow and director of the Corporate Technology Group, outlined long-term research to make “user-aware” platform technologies that could be used to build systems that intuitively respond to people and their ever-changing needs.

Rattner mentioned that:

the current problem is that electronic products have almost no way of knowing how they are being used, who is using them, or what the user wants to accomplish without that person directing their every move. This leads to frustration because of what people have to do just to use and manage their technology.

This kind of statements are of course sweat music to my hears and perfectly match my interests in the management of uncertainty in pervasive environment. It is an incredible challenge to envision electronic products to be capable of adapting to the way people around the world use them. “Out of clutter find simplicity” as Einstein would say.

In his Ethical Guidelines for Ubicomp Adam Greenfield mentions the same challenges but in more user-centered terms:

If ubicomp applications are rushed to market and allowed to appear as have so many technological artifacts in the last thirty years – i.e. without compassionate attention to the needs and abilities of all sorts of human users, without many painstaking rounds of iterative testing and improvement in realistic settings – then they will present those users with a truly unprecedented level of badness.