Thesis 40


The discourse of seamlessness effaces or elides meaningful distinctions between systems.

Closely related to the question of everyware's imperceptibility is its seamlessness. This is the idea that both the inner workings of a given system and its junctures with others should be imperceptible to the user, and it's been extraordinarily influential in ubicomp circles over the last eight or ten years. In fact, seamless has become one of those words that one rarely hears except in the context of phrases like "seamless interaction," "seamless integration," "seamless interconnection," or "seamless interfaces."

The notion inarguably has a pedigree in the field; the term itself goes straight back to the ubiquitous Mark Weiser. Ironically enough, though, given its later widespread currency, Weiser regarded seamlessness as an undesirable and fundamentally homogenizing attribute in a ubiquitous system.

Without seams, after all, it's hard to tell where one thing ends and something else beginspoints of difference and distinction tend to be smoothed over or flattened out. very much alive to this danger, Weiser advocated the alternative concept of "seamfulness, with beautiful seams," in which users are helped to understand the systems they encounter, how they work, and what happens at their junctures with one another by the design of the systems themselves.

However rewarding, properly providing the user with seamful experiences is obviously a rather time-consuming and difficult way to go about doing things. Maybe this is why Matthew Chalmers and Ian MacColl, then of the University of Glasgow, found in 2003 that Weiser's musings had been oddly inverted in the process of their reification. Phrases invoking seam-lessness positively peppered the ubicomp literature they surveyed, from IBM's pervasive computing Web site to the EU's prospectus for its Disappearing Computer initiativeand where the idea appeared in such material, it was generally presented as an unquestioned good and a goal to which the whole ubicomp community should aspire.

Chalmers and MacColl decided to reintroduce the notion of beautiful seams, challenging the whole discourse of smooth continuity they found to be endemic in contemporary models of ubicomp. But while they were among the earliest critics of seamlessness, they were far from alone in their discomfort with the notion, at least if the frequency with which their work on seamful design is cited is any indication.

Critics were motivated by several apparent flaws in the staging of seamless presentations. The most obvious was dishonesty: The infrastructure supporting the user's experience is deeply heterogeneous, and, at least in contemporary, real-world systems, frequently enough held together by the digital equivalent of duct tape and chewing gum. In Chalmers and MacColl's words, ubiquitous devices and infrastructural components "have limited sampling rates and resolution, are prone to communication delays and disconnections, have finite data storage limits and have representational schemes of finite scope and accuracy"; any attempt to provide the user with a continuous experience must somehow paper over these circumstances.

More worrisome than simple dishonesty, though, is the paternalism involved: seamlessness deprives the user of meaningful participation in the decisions that affect his or her experience. The example often given by Chalmers, in his discussion of the distinctions between seamlessness and its inverse, is that of a mobile phone user: In most such cases, information such as differentials in signal strength between adjacent cells, or the location of boundaries at which a phone is "handed over" from one cell to another, is inaccessible, handled automatically at a level beneath presentation in the interface.

While such information is probably useless, or even annoying, to most users at most times, it surely might prove desirable for some users at some times. By extension, most ubiquitous systems will involve the sort of complexity that designers are ordinarily tempted to sweep under the rug, secure in the wisdom that "users don't care about that." No matter how correct this determination may be in most cases, or how well-intentioned the effort to shield the user, there should always be some accommodation for those wishing to bring the full scope of a system's complexity to light.

Another critical flaw in seamlessness was also first raised by Chalmers and MacColl, and it related to the question of appropriation. Drawing on the earlier work of Paul Dourish and Steve Harrison, they questioned whether a system that was presented to users as seamless could ever afford those users the sense of ownership so critical to rewarding experiences of technology.

Dourish and Harrison offered as an object lesson the distinction between two early videoconferencing systems, from Bellcore Labs and Xerox PARC. The Bellcore system, videoWindow, was an extremely sophisticated effort in supporting "copresence"; it was complex and expensive, and it presented itself to users monolithically. In Dourish and Harrison's words, "it wasn't theirs, and they could not make it theirs." By contrast, users could and did play with the Xerox system, based as it was on cheap, portable cameras. Predictably enough, those who used the Xerox effort found that it "offered something wonderful," while the designers of videoWindow could only lamely conclude from their disappointing trials that their system "lack[ed] something due to factors we do not understand."

Chalmers and MacColl drew from this the inference that systems presented as seamless would be difficult to appropriate, claim and customize in the ways that seem to make people happiest. visible seams, by contrast, expose the places where users can "reach into" a system and tune it to their preference.

The resonance of such critiques will only grow as ubiquitous systems get closer to everyday reality, because the discourse of seamlessness continues to hold sway in the field. Consider how they might play out in the relationship between two notional data-collection systems, biometric in nature, one of which operates at the household level and the other at some ambiguously larger scale.

You own the local system, whose tendrils reach from your refrigerator to the bathroom scale to the exercise monitor you wear to the gym. While it is constantly deriving precise numeric values for attributes like caloric intake and body-mass index, its findings are delivered to you not as raw data, but as gentle, high-level comments that appear on the bathroom mirror and the refrigerator door: "Run an extra ten minutes this morning," or "Try adding leafy greens to today's meals."

And while most of us, for obvious reasons, would not want something like this directly connected with the outside world, in this case your health-management system is interfaced with your household-management system. And it is the latter that is coupled, at levels beneath your awareness, to larger, external information-gathering effortsthose belonging to insurance companies, or marketers, or the Department of Health and Human Services.

These are two different manifestations of seamlessness, and both interfere with your ability to regulate the flow of information around you. Maybe you're actually curious to know exactly how many calories you burned today. More seriously, of course, is the problem posed by the obscure interconnection of apparently discrete systems. There we run into the same issue we saw with PayPass: that the decision made to shield the user from the system's workings also conceals who is at risk and who stands to benefit in a given transaction.

Given these potentials, there's something refreshing about the notion of making the seams and junctions that hold our technologies together at least optionally visible. In some sense, doing so would demolish the magical sense of effortlessness so many theories of ubiquitous design aim for, but that could always be switched back on, couldn't it?

I like the honesty of seamfulness, the way it invites users to participate in a narrative from which they had been foreclosed. In everyware as in life, good fences make good neighbors.



Everyware. The dawning age of ubiquitous computing
Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing
ISBN: 0321384016
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 124

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