Copyright

Everyware: The dawning age of ubiquitous computing

Adam Greenfield

New Riders
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Project Editor: Michael J. Nolan

Development Editor: Dan Littman

Production Editor: Hilal Sala

Copyeditor: Alan Reade

Compositor: Joan Olson

Indexer: Karin Arrigoni

Cover design: Alicia Buelow

Interior design: Joan Olson

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ISBN 0-321-38401-6

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed and bound in the United States of America

Dedication

For Nurri, just like honey

They built the world as we know it...

All the systems you traverse.

The Fall, I Am Kurious Oranj

Introduction

A Note On Everyware

1.

This book is an attempt to describe the form computing will take in the next few years . Specifically, it's about a vision of processing power so distributed throughout the environment that computers per se effectively disappear. It's about the enormous consequences this disappearance has for the kinds of tasks computers are applied to, for the way we use them, and for what we understand them to be.

Although aspects of this vision have been called a variety of namesubiquitous computing, pervasive computing, physical computing, tangible media, and so onI think of them as facets of one coherent paradigm of interaction that I call everyware.

In everyware, all the information we now look to our phones or Web browsers to provide becomes accessible from just about anywhere , at any time, and is delivered in a manner appropriate to our location and context.

In everyware, the garment , the room and the street become sites of processing and mediation. Household objects from shower stalls to coffee pots are reimagined as places where facts about the world can be gathered, considered , and acted upon. And all the familiar rituals of daily lifethings as fundamental as the way we wake up in the morning, get to work, or shop for our groceriesare remade as an intricate dance of information about ourselves , the state of the external world, and the options available to us at any given moment.

In all of these scenarios, there are powerful informatics underlying the apparent simplicity of the experience, but they never breach the surface of awareness: things Just Work. Interactions with everyware feel natural, spontaneous , human. Ordinary people finally get to benefit from the full power of information technology, without having to absorb the esoteric bodies of knowledge on which it depends. And the sensation of useeven while managing an unceasing and torrential flow of datais one of calm, of relaxed mastery.

This, anyway, is the promise.