Thesis 04

Everyware gives rise to a regime of ambient informatics.

With its provisions for sensing capacity built into such a wide variety of everyday objects, we've seen that everyware multiplies by many, many times the number of places in the world in which information can be gathered. The global network will no longer be fed simply by keyboards, microphones, and cameras, in other words, but also by all of the inputs implied by the pervasive deployment of computational awareness.

Even if all of those new inputs were fed into conventional outputsWeb sites, say, or infographics on the evening newsthat would certainly be a significant evolution in the way we experience the world. But everyware also provides for a far greater diversity of channels through which information can be expressed, either locally or remotely. In addition to relatively ordinary displays, it offers spoken notifications, "earcons" and other audio cues; changes in light level or color; even alterations in the physical qualities of objects and architectural surfaces, from temperature to reflectivity.

And it's this expansion in the available modes of output that is likely to exert a much stronger shaping influence on our lives. When so many more kinds of information can be expressed just about anywhere, the practical effect will be to bring about a relationship with that information that I think of as ambient informatics.

Ambient informatics is a state in which information is freely available at the point in space and time someone requires it, generally to support a specific decision. Maybe it's easiest simply to describe it as information detached from the Web's creaky armature of pages, sites, feeds and browsers, and set free instead in the wider world to be accessed when, how and where you want it.

One of the notions that arrives alongside ambient informatics is the idea of context-or location-aware services. This could be something as simple as a taxi's rooftop advertisement cross-referencing current GPS coordinates with a database of bank branches, in order to display the location of the nearest ATM. It could be the hackneyed m-commerce use case, all but invariably trotted out in these discussions, of a discount "coupon" sent to your phone whenever you pass through the catchment area of a Starbucks or a McDonald's. Or it might simply mean that the information pushed to you varies with where you are, who you're with, and what you're doing.

Ideally, this means effortless utilitythe day's weather displayed on your bathroom mirror, the traffic report on your windshield, the cue embedded in your wallet or handbag that lets you know when one of your friends is within a hundred meters of your present positionbut, as we shall see, there are darker implications as well. Perhaps we'll find that a world with too much information presents as many problems as one with too little.

Either way, there will still be an Internet, and we'll likely make more use of it than ever before. But with contextual information diffused as appropriate in the environment, we won't need a computer to get to it, and the entire Web as we've come to know it may become something of a backwater.