Resonances and Everyday Life: Ubiquitous Computing and the City

In Resonances and Everyday Life: Ubiquitous Computing and the City, Anne Galloway introduces ubicomp researchers with social and cultural studies (theories of everyday life). It is rather off my particular research interest but a macro-vision on ubicomp surely does not hurt. I found really interesting that we must understand what is invisible to us (engineers) in order to design for invisible ubiquitous computing.

“Mark Weiser wanted ubiquitous computing to become invisible, but he also called on the humanities and social sciences to make visible to engineers and computer scientists what is often invisible so that they could better design for context-awareness. Theories of everyday life are dedicated to that very task”

Anne mentions that

ubiquitous computing was positioned to bring computers to “our world” (domesticating them), rather than us having to adapt to the “computer world” (domesticating us)

and referring to Norman

“today, it is the individual who must conform to the needs of technology. It is time to make technology conform to the needs of people”.

In many ways, current ubicomp technologies are not fully ready yet (will they ever be?) for such a shift. Current ubiquitous environments won’t be accepted if we present them as fully adaptive and conforming to our needs. Because they simply cannot match these expectations. Constraints are not only technological, but also economical, physical and cultural. Instead of aiming for the undeliverable and when limits are reached, a pragmatic approach is to work on the human’s empathy for technology, that is having ubiquitous environment communicating their “state of servileness” and provide fail-over techniques to the user. Examples being: a positioning system unable to get a fix voluntary giving its user the hand for self-positioning, my mobile phone already warns that its battery will be discharged soon, or planning for sporadic connectivity.