Seamful and Seamless Design in Ubiquitous Computing

Seamful and Seamless Design in Ubiquitous Computing is a technical report by Matthew Chalmers and Ian MacColl for the Equator Project. It is yet another paper suggesting more ‘visibility’ and recalling Weiser’s notion of ‘seamful’ interaction, with ‘beautiful seams’, similar ideas as Seamful Design for Location-Based Mobile Games. However here the authors focus on uncertainty and even more interestingly on appropriation (positive design approaches).

The notion of “invisible computer” is often translated into requirements for seamless integration of computer system components. Mark Weiser suggested that making things seamless amounts to making everything the same, and he advocated seamful systems as the goal. Making everything the same is easy; leeting everything be itself, with other things, is hard. Therefor seamlessness could mean sacrificing the richness of each tool in order to obtain bland compatibility. Seamful design is a pragmatic approach that lets a ubicomp systm be itself, accepting all its physical and computational characteristics (weaknesses or strenghts). The phyisical characterisitcs of ubicomp systems are often apparent as uncertainty and inaccuracy.

The mention the impact of uncertainty in shared context and location awareness. Something I would like to investigate in the upcoming weeks:

Spatial uncertainty is problematic for several reasons. The aim of shared spatial awareness is mutual visibility, indicating to other visitors what particular visitor might be viewing. Uncertainty about the action position of a PDA visitor showed in the spatial awareness displays by apparent jumps of up to 2m. This sometimes made difficult for trial participants to establish shared context although visitors did resolve some this uncertainty through talk.

and even put forward other technical and non-technical sources of uncertainty

Beyond the inaccuracy of physical sensing and the ambiguity of references, ubiquitous systems must increasingly deal with complex and dynamic technical problems related to bandwidth, power, latency, disconnection, and so forth. Non-technical aspects are also affected by uncertainty, such as awareness of others’ locations and activity. These are often apparent through the patterns of social interaction more than interaction with devices and interfaces. Privacy, for example, can be seen as explicit control of the degree of certainty we permit others to have about us, e.g. by permitting others to know roughly, but not exactly, where we are.

The act of permitting other to know roughly but not exactly is studies in Social Disclosure Of Place: From Location Technology to Communication Practices and Location disclosure to social relations: why, when, & what people want to share.

Ubicomp as part of CSCW raises issues of appropriation. In their paper on the duality of space and place (Your Place or Mine? Learning from Long-Term Use of Audio-Video Communication), Harrison and Dourish argue that an expensive, complex system they had observed couldn’t be “owned” by its users, inhibiting adoption and enjoyment. We should talk a view which “emphasises emergent communicative practices, rather than looking for the transfer of face-to-face behaviours.”

Other studies of media spaces and of other collaborative technologies, consistently point out that
accommodation and appropriation is key to the adoption of new technologies: users design their
activity to accommodate the particular technologies we offer them.

Extending the analysis of Harrison and Dourish, one approach to designing for appropriation is to aim for systems whose underlying mechanisms are “literally visible, effectively invisible” in that everyday interaction does not require attention to these mechanisms’ representations—but one can selectively focus on and reveal them when the task is to understand or even change the tool.

A next step in seamful design of ubiquitous environment is to find patterns and correlations that describe which aspects of system structure, sensing and categorization to reveal, and in what form. We may be able to find correlations, and offer recommendations, but explanations will be harder to find.

The ultimate design goal here is a good tool lets users focus on their task – event when that task involves changing the tool itself.