Thesis 51


The precise shape of everyware is contingent on the decisions made by designers, regulators, and markets of empowered buyers. The greater mass of people exposed to such systems are likely to have relatively little say in their composition.

If societies are afforded some leeway in choosing just how a particular technology appears, what does history tell us about how this process has played out in the recent past?

Societies, as it happens, turn their backs on technologies all the time, even some that seem to be at the very cusp of their accession to prominence. Citizen initiatives have significantly shaped the emergenceand the commercial viabilityof biotechnology and genetically modified foods planetwide; concerns both ethical and environmental continue to be raised about cloning and nanotechnology.[*] Nor are Americans any exception to the general rule, however happy we are to be seen (and to portray ourselves) as a nation of can-do techno-optimists: In the past twenty years, we've rejected fission power and supersonic commercial aviation, to name just two technologies that once seemed inevitable. And these outcomes, too, had a lot to do with local struggles and grassroots action.

[*] For that matter, similar concerns have also been raised about producing computing on a scale sufficient to supply the rural developing world with "$100 laptops." See, e.g., worldchanging.com.

Some would say that bottom-up resistance to such technologies arises out of an almost innumerate inability to calculate riskout of simple fear of the unknown, that is, rather than any reasoned cost-benefit analysis. There are also, without doubt, those who feel that such resistance "impedes progress." But outcomes such as these stand as testament to a certain vigor remaining in democracy: In considering the debates over fission and the SST, the clear lessonas corny as it may seemis that the individual voice has made a difference. And this has been the case even when groups of disconnected individuals have faced coherent, swaggeringly self-confident, and infinitely better-funded pro-technology lobbies.

So on the one hand, we have reason to trust that "the system works." At least in the United States, we have some reason to believe that the ordinary messy process of democracy functions effectively to discover those technologies whose adoption appears particularly unwise, even if it's not necessarily able to propose meaningful alternatives to them. And this may well turn out to be the case where the more deleterious aspects of ubiquitous technology are concerned.

But something tells me everyware will be different. It's a minuscule technology, one that proceeds by moments and levers its way in via whatever crevices it is afforded. It will call itself by different names, it will appear differently from one context to another, and it will almost always wear the appealing masks of safety or convenience. And as we've seen, the relevant choices will be made by a relatively large number of people each responding to their own local need"large," anyway, as compared to the compact decision nexus involved in the production of a fission plant or a supersonic airliner.

Who, then, will get to determine the shape of the ubiquitous computing we experience?

Designers, obviouslyby which I mean the entire apparatus of information-technology production, from initial conceptual framing straight through to marketing.

Regulators, too, will play a part; given everyware's clear potential to erode privacy, condition public space, and otherwise impinge on the exercise of civil liberties, there is a legitimate role for state actors here.

And markets surely will. In fact, of all of these influences, the market is likely to have the most significant impact on what kinds of everyware find their way into daily use, with self-evidently dangerous, wasteful, or pointless implementations facing the usual penalties. But let's not get carried away with enthusiasm about the power of markets to converge on wise choicesas anyone who's been involved with technology can tell you, buyers are frequently not at all the same people as end users, and there are many instances in which their interests are diametrically opposed to one another. A corporate IT department, for example, generally purchases PCs based on low bid, occasionally ease of maintenance; the user experience is rarely factored, as it properly should be, into estimates of the total cost of ownership (TCO).

Left out of these considerations, though, is the greater mass of people who will be affected by the appearance of everyware, who will find their realities shaped in countless ways by the advent of a pervasive, ubiquitous, and ambient informatics. And while there is a broad community of professionalsusability specialists, interaction designers, information architects, and others working under the umbrella of user experiencethat has been able to advocate for the end user in the past, with varying degrees of effectiveness, that community's practice is still oriented primarily to the challenges of personal computing. The skill sets and especially the mindsets appropriate to user-experience work in everyware have barely begun to be developed.

This raises the crucial question of timing. Are discussions of everyware abstract debates best suited to the coffeehouse and the dorm room, or are they items for near-term agendas, things we should be discussing in our school-board and city-council and shareholder meetings right now?

I strongly believe that the latter is truethat the interlocking influences of designer, regulator, and market will be most likely to result in beneficial outcomes if these parties all treat everyware as a present reality, and if the decision makers concerned act accordingly. This is especially true of members of the user experience community, who will best be able to intervene effectively if they develop appropriate insights, tools, and methodologies ahead of the actual deployment of ubiquitous systems.

In Chapter 6 we will consider whywhile everyware is indeed both an immediate issue and a "hundred-year problem"it makes the most sense to treat everyware as an emergent reality in the near term.



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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