The Human Experience in Ubicomp

In “The Human Experience” Abowd, Gregory D., Elizabeth D. Mynatt, and Tom Rodden. In IEEE Pervasive Computing, 2002, the authors focus on physical interaction, general application features, and theories of design and evaluation to match the goals of Weiser’s human-centered vision of ubiquitous computing:

• Everyday practices of people must be understood and supported
• The world must be augmented through the provisioning of heterogeneous devices offering different forms of interactive experience
• Networked devices must be orchestrated to provide for a holistic user experience.

Defining the appropriate physical interaction experience
The advance of sensing and recognition technologies allow us to move beyond the traditional input as explicit communication. Therefor there is a shift toward implicit from explicit means of human input to more implicit form of input:

In other words our natural interactions with the physical environment provide sufficient input to a variety of attendant services, without any further user intervention. For example, walking into a space is enough to announce your presence and identity in that location.

I would ponderate such statements. As we saw in CatchBob! we must be careful with the balance between implicit and explicit communication. Explicit input carries an intention, it is an act of communication, while implicit input misses this kind of contextual information. Depending on the context, stepping in a space might not be enough or might be too much to announce a presence. Explicit input is the user’s way master the measured world and to control his relation between the physical and virtual world.

The communication from the environment to the user – the output – has become highly distributed. The challenge is to coordinate across many output locations and modalities without overwhelming our limited attention spans.

Seamless integration of physical and virtual worlds
Of course, the noble goal of “seamless integration” raises my eyebrows. I have a tendency to be more pragmatic and not advertise the “S”(eamless) word in ubicomp. Somehow, I like to stick with Weiser’s “phase I” but have nothing against reading “post-phase I” thoughts and visions. Abrow et al. notice the emergence of three features in ubicomp applications:

• We must be able to use implicitly sensed context from physical and electronic electronic environment to determine a given service’s correct behavior.
• We must provision automated service to easily capture and store memories of live experiences and serve them up for later use
• We move towared the infusion of ubicomp into our everyday lives, the services provided will need to become constantly available partners with the human users, always interrupted and easily resumed.

I am wondering here how much implicit, automated and omnipresent is good for the user. Where is the balance? And then how much can we master this balance in uncontrolled environments? An obvious challenge is to make context-aware computing truly ubiquitous?

Everyday computing

Everyday computing promotes informal and unstructured activities typical of much of our everyday lives. It focuses on activities rather than on tasks. [...] Of course, activities and tasks are not unrelated to each other. Often an activity will comprise several tasks, but the activity itself is more that these component parts. [...] The emphasis on designing for continuously available interaction requires addressing these features of informal daily lifes:

• They rarely have a clear beginning or end
• Interruption is expected as users switch attention
• Multiple activities operate concurrently and might be loosely coordinated
• Time is an important discriminator in characterizing the ongoing relationship between people and computer
• Associative models of information are needed, because information is reused from multiple perspectives

Theories of design and evaluation
The shift from a single machine with and individual to a broader set of organizational and social arrangements has seen the development of new models of interaction to support the design process in broader organizational setting. The ubicomp community is currently exploring three main models of cognition as guides for future design a evaluation

Activity theory
Built on Lev Vygotsky’s work (The Instrumental Method in Psychology):

activity theory recognizes concepts such as goals (objects), actions, and operations. However, both goals and actions are fluid, based on the world’s changing physical state instead of more fixed, a priori plans. [...] The user’s behavior is shaped by the capabilities implicit in the tool itself.32 Ubicomp’s efforts informed by activity theory, therefore, focus on the transformational properties of artifacts and the fluid execution of actions and operations.

Situated action

In this model, knowledge in the world continually shapes the ongoing interpretation and execution of a task. [...] Ubicomp’s efforts informed by a situated action also emphasize improvisational behavior and would not require, nor anticipate, the user to follow a predefined script.

Distributed cognition

This theory focuses on the collaborative process, where multiple people use multiple objects to achieve a larger systems goal [...] Ubicomp efforts informed by distributed cognition focus on designing for a larger system goal in contrast to using an individual appliance. These efforts emphasize how information is encoded in objects and how different users translate or transcribe that information.

Richer understanding of settings
There is an obvious need to gain a rich understanding of the everyday world to inform IT development. The challenge for ubicomp designers is uncover the very practices through which people live and to make these invisible practices visible and available to the developers to ubicomp environments (as already mentioned in Resonances and Everyday Life: Ubiquitous Computing and the City).

Assessment of use
We must also assess the utility of ubicomp solutions:

To understand ubicomp’s impact on everyday life, we navigate a delicate balance between predicting how novel technologies will serve a real human need and observing authentic use and subsequent coevolution of human activities and novel technologies. [...] there has been surprisingly little research published from an evaluation or end-user perspective in the ubicomp community.

The need for new measures
There is still the question of how to apply qualitative and quantitative evaluation methods and doing empricial evaluation with the deployment of more living laboratories.:

Evaluation in HCI reflects these roots and is often predicated on notions of task and the measurement of performance and efficiency in meeting these goals and tasks. However, it is not clear that these measures can apply universally across activities when we move away from structured and paid work to other activities. [...] This shift away from the world of work means that there is still the question of how to apply qualitative or quantitative evaluation methods[...] By pushing on the deployment of more living laboratories for ubicomp research, the science and practice of HCI evaluation will mature.