Thesis 18

In many circumstances, we can't really conceive of the human being engaging everyware as a "user."

Traditionally, the word we use to describe the human person engaged in interaction with a technical system is "user": "user-friendly," "user-centered." (More pointedly, and exposing some of the frustration the highly technically competent may experience when dealing with nonspecialists: "luser.")

Despite this precedent, however, the word stumbles and fails in the context of everyware. As a description of someone encountering ubiquitous systems, it's simply not accurate.

At the most basic level, one no more "uses" everyware than one would a book to read or the floor to stand on. For many of the field's originators, the whole point of designing ubiquitous systems was that they would be ambient, peripheral, and not focally attended to in the way that something actively "used" must be.

Perhaps more importantly, "user" also fails to reflect the sharply reduced volitionality that is so often bound up with such encounters. We've already seen that everyware is something that may be engaged by the act of stepping into a room, so the word carries along with it the implication of an agency that simply may not exist.

Finally, exactly because of its historical pedigree in the field, the term comes with some baggage we might well prefer to dispense with. As HCI researcher Jonathan Grudin has argued, because "the computer is assumed [and] the user must be specified" even in phrases like "user-centered design," such terminology "retains and reinforces an engineering perspective" inimical to our present concerns.

I think we might be better served by a word that did a better job of evoking the full, nuanced dimensions of what is experienced by someone encountering everyware. The trouble is that most other candidate words succumb to the same trap that ensnares "user." They also elide one or more important aspects of this person's experience.

Of the various alternative terms that might be proposed, there is one that captures two aspects of the everyware case that happen to be in real tension with one another, both of which are necessary to account for: "subject."

On the one hand, a subject is someone with interiority, with his or her own irreducible experience of the world; one has subjectivity. But interestingly enough, we also speak of a person without a significant degree of choice in a given matter as being subject to something: law, regulation, change. As it turns out, both senses are appropriate in describing the relationship between a human being and the types of systems we're interested in.

But a moment's consideration tells us that "subject" is no good either. To my ears, anyway, it sounds tinny and clinical, a word that cannot help but conjure up visions of lab experiments, comments inscribed on clipboards by white-coated grad students. I frankly cannot imagine it being adopted for this purpose in routine speech, either by professionals in the field or by anyone else.

So we may be stuck with "user" after all, at least for the foreseeable future, no matter how inaccurate it is. Perhaps the best we can hope for is to remain acutely mindful of its limitations.