Thesis 08

The project of everyware is nothing less than the colonization of everyday life by information technology.

Objects, surfaces, gestures, behaviors: as we've seen, all have become fair game for technological intervention. Considered one by one, each intervention may proceed by granular and minuscule steps, but in the aggregate, whether intentionally or not, the effect is to begin overwriting the features of our day-to-day existence with something that never used to be there.

We all have an idea what "everyday life" means, though of course the details will be different for each of us. your conception might be organized around work: rushing to catch the train, delivering a convincing presentation to your colleagues, and remembering to pick up the dry cleaning on the way home. Someone else's might reside primarily in frustrations like paying the phone bill, or waiting in stalled traffic on the freeway.

My own sense of everyday life resides in less stressful moments, like strolling through the neighborhood after dinner with my wife, meeting friends for a drink, or simply gazing out the window onto the life of the city. However the overall tenor diverges, though, we have this much in common: We all know what it's like to bathe and dress, eat and socialize, make homes and travel between them.

Our lives are built from basic, daily operations like these. We tend to think of them as being somehow interstitial to the real business of a life, but we wind up spending much of our time on earth engaged in them. And it's precisely these operations that everyware proposes to usefully augment, out here in the rough-and-tumble of ordinary existence, in what I've elsewhere called "the brutal regime of the everyday." It aims to address questions as humble, and as important, as "Where did I leave my keys?" "Will I be warm enough in this jacket?" "What's the best way to drive to work this morning?"

As unheroic as they are, the transactions of everyday life would hardly seem to require technical intervention. It seems strange to think of managing them through an interface of digital mediation, or indeed applying any technology beyond the most basic to their enrichment. And yet that is where computing currently appears to be headed.

The stakes are high. But troublinglyespecially given the narrow window of time we have in which to make meaningful choices about the shape of everywarea comprehensive understanding of what the options before us really mean has been hard to come by.

In the rest of this book, we'll attempt to offer just that. We'll start by examining how everyware differs from the information technology we've become accustomed to. We'll prise out, in some detail, what is driving its emergence and try to get a handle on some of the most pressing issues it confronts us with. We'll sum it all up by asking who gets to determine the shape of everyware's unfolding, how soon we need to be thinking about it, and finally, and perhaps most importantly, what we can do to improve the chance that as it appears, it does so in ways congenial to us.