3.

We will surely need one, at any rate, if we are to make sense of the wave of change even now bearing down on us. And we will feel this need in short order, because whether we're ready for it or not, everyware is coming.

It is coming because there are too many too powerful institutions vested in its coming, knowing what enormous market possibilities are opened up by the conquest of the everyday. It is coming because it is an irresistible, "technically sweet" challenge, for designers no less than engineers. It is coming because something like it effectively became inevitable the moment our tools, products and services started communicating in ones and zeroes.

It is comingand as yet, the people who will be most affected by it, the overwhelming majority of whom are nontechnical, nonspecialist, ordinary citizens of the developed world, barely know it even exists.

This is not due to any inherent obscurity or lack of interest in the field; to date, there have been some seven annual Ubicomp conferences, three Pervasives, and a wide scatter of smaller but otherwise similar colloquia. These are established events, in academic terms: well-attended, underwritten by companies such as Intel, Sony, Nokia and Samsung. There are at least three peer-reviewed professional journals exclusively dedicated to ubiquitous or pervasive computing. There has been no dearth of discussion of everyware...but little of this discussion, and virtually none that might offer enough information on which to build meaningful choices, has reached the mainstream.

There is a window of time before the issues we've touched upon become urgent daily realities for most of us, but it is narrowing by the day. As of this writing, "u-" for "ubiquitous" has already joined "e-" and "i-" in the parade of content-free buzz-prefixes used by the marketers of technology to connote trendiness; not a day goes by without the appearance of some relevant news item.

We hear about RFID tags being integrated into employee ID cards, a new modular sensor grid on the architectural market, a networking scheme proposing to use the body's own electrical field to carry informationand this in the general press, not the specialist journals. There's already a steady stream of prototype everyware emerging from the research labs and the more advanced corporate design studios, no matter whether they're answers to questions nobody's much asked.

With actual, consumer-facing applications (and implications) starting to appear, it's time for discussions about everyware's potential for risk and reward to leave the tight orbit of academic journals and conferences behind. If everyware hasn't yet reached its Betamax vs. VHS stagethat stage in the adoption of any new technology where the standards that will determine the particulars of its eventual shape are ironed outwe can see that it's not so terribly far off. It's time for the people who have the most at stake in the emergence of this technology to take their rightful place at the table. The challenge now is to begin thinking about how we can mold that emergence to suit our older prerogatives of personal agency, civil liberty, and simple sanity.