Thesis 05

At its most refined, everyware can be understood as information processing dissolving in behavior.

The great product designer Naoto Fukasawa speaks of "design dissolving in behavior." By this, he means interactions with designed systems so well thought out by their authors, and so effortless on the part of their users, that they effectively abscond from awareness.

The objects he is best known formobile phones and CD players, humidifiers and television sets, uniformly display this quality. His work draws much of its power from its attention to the subtle, humble, profoundly comfortable ways in which people use the worldthe unconsciousness with which people hang umbrellas from a lunch counter by their handles, use notepads as impromptu drink coasters, or gaze at their reflections in a mug of coffee. There's a lot in common here with Mark Weiser's dictum that "the most profound technologies are those that disappear."

Correspondingly, we can think of everyware as information processing dissolving in behavior. This is the ambition that I discern behind so many of the scenarios of ubiquitous and pervasive computing, from Roy Want to Don Norman: that we could claim the best of both worlds, harnessing all of the power of a densely networked environment, but refining its perceptible signs until they disappear into the things we do every day.

In this telling, ordinary interactions with information become transparent, eliminating the needless deformations introduced by our forty-year fixation on "the computer." you close the door to your office because you want privacy, and your phone and IM channel are automatically set to "unavailable." you point to an unfamiliar word in a text, and a definition appears. you sit down to lunch with three friends, and the restaurant plays only music that you've all rated highly. In each scenario, powerful informatics intervene to produce the experience, but you'd have to look pretty hard to turn up their traces. Such interactions are supposed to feel natural, human, right.

Well and good, in principle. How does it work in practice? Let's take a canonical example: the exchange of business cards.

This tiny ritual happens by the million every day, throughout the commercial world. The practice differs from place to place, but it is always important, always symbolically freighted with performances of status and power, or accessibility and openness. It's no stretch to assert that billion-dollar deals have hinged on this exchange of tokens. How could it be reimagined as everyware?

One, relatively crude and timid, expression might propose that, instead of the inert slips of paper we now proffer, we hand out RFID-equipped "smart" cards encoding our contact information and preferences. (Maybe you'd tap such a card against a reader to place a call, without having to be bothered with the details of remembering a number, or even a full name; fans of Aliens may recall that Lt. Ripley availed herself of just such an interface, in her wee-hours call to corporate weasel Burke.)

In a more aggressive version of this story the physical token disappears from the transaction; instead, a data file containing the same information is transmitted from one party to the other over a low-voltage network, using the skin's own inherent conductivity. Maybe, in a further refinement, the only data actually sent over the network is a pointer, a key to unlock a record maintained locally elsewhere.

And there it is, everyware's true and perfect sigil. Information has passed between two parties, adding a node to one's personal or professional network. This transaction takes several steps to accomplish on a contemporary social-networking site, and here it's been achieved with a simple handshakean act externally indistinguishable from its non-enhanced equivalent. Here we can truly begin to understand what Weiser may have been thinking when he talked about "disappearance."

If that's too abstract for you, let's take a look at MasterCard's RFID-equipped PayPass contactless payment system, which will have been introduced commercially (alongside Chase's competing Blink) by the time this book is published. MasterCard's tagline for PayPass is "tap & go," but that belies the elaborate digital choreography concealed behind the simple, appealing premise.

Schematically, it looks like this: you bring your card, key fob, or other PayPass-equipped object into range, by tapping it on the reader's "landing zone." The reader feeds power inductively to the device's embedded antenna, which powers the chip. The chip responds by transmitting an encrypted stream of data corresponding to your account number, a stream produced by modulating the strength of the electromagnetic field between it and the reader.

From this point forward, the transaction proceeds in the conventional manner: the reader queries the network for authorization, compares the amount of the purchase in question with the availability of funds on hand, and confirms or denies the purchase. And all of that happens in the space of 0.2 seconds: far less than a single heartbeat, and, as MasterCard clearly counts on, not nearly enough time to consider the ramifications of what we've just done.

Intel Research's Elizabeth Goodman argues that, "[t]he promise of computing technology dissolving into behavior, invisibly permeating the natural world around us cannot be reached," because "technology is...that which by definition is separate from the natural." In the face of technologies like PayPass, though, I wonder whether she's right. I don't think it's at all unlikely that such transactions will effectively become invisibleat least, for most of us, most of the time.

I do, however, think it's of concern. If this dissolving into behavior is the Holy Grail of a calm and unobtrusive computing, it's also the crux of so many of the other issues which ought to unsettle ussimultaneously everyware's biggest promise, and its greatest challenge.