Thesis 34

Everyware insinuates itself into transactions never before subject to technical intervention.

Even if you yourself are not a connoisseur of gourmet bathing experiences, you may be interested to learn that the Brazilian company IHOUSE last year offered for sale something it called the Smart Hydro "intelligent bathtub."

The Smart Hydro is a preview of the experience that awaits us in the fully networked home, at least at the high end of the market. It really puts the bather in the driver's seat, as it were, giving its user access to a range of preference settings, from the essentials of water temperature and level to treats like "bath essence or foam, a variety of hydromassage programs and even light intensity." It can even be programmed to fill itself and then call you on your mobile phone mid-commute, just to let you know that your bath will be ready for you the moment you step through the door. (Of course it will be "[kept] temperature controlled until you arrive home.")

But you already knew how to draw a bath, didn't you? And you've somehow survived this far in life without the help of automated calls from the bathroom infrastructure. In fact, learning how to manage your bathtub's preference settings is probably not on the list of things you most want to do with your timenot when you've pretty much had a handle on the situation since the age of five or six.

Especially as a consequence of its insinuation into everyday life, everyware appears in all kinds of transactions that have never before been subject to highly technical intervention. Ubicomp advocate Mike Kuniavsky acknowledges this in his "Smart Furniture Manifesto": in his own words, endowing furniture and other everyday things with digital intelligence "can introduce all kinds of complexity and failure modes that don't currently exist." (I'd argue that you can replace the "can" in that sentence with "demonstrably will.")

The consequences of such complexification extend beyond bathing, or the similarly simple but profound pleasures of hearth and table, to implicate a further set of experiences that tend to be the most meaningful and special to us.

Take friendship. Current social-networking applications, like Orkut or Friendster, already offer us digital profiles of the people we know. An ambient versionand such systems have been proposedcould interpose these profiles in real time, augmenting the first glimpse of an acquaintance with an overlay of their name, a list of the friends we have in common, and an indication of how warmly we regard them. The benefit qua memory augmentation is obvious, perfect for those of us who always feel more than a little guilty about forgetting someone's name. But doesn't this begin to redefine what it means to "recognize" or to "know" someone? (We'll see in the next thesis that such a degree of explicitness poses significant challenges socially as well as semantically.)

Take exercise, or play, or sexuality, all of which will surely become sites of intense mediation in a fully developed everyware milieu. Something as simple as hiking in the wilderness becomes almost unrecognizable when overlaid with GPS location, sophisticated visual pattern-recognition algorithms, and the content of networked geological, botanical, and zoological databasesyou won't get lost, surely, or mistake poisonous mushrooms for the edible varieties, but it could hardly be said that you're "getting away from it all."

Even meditation is transformed into something new and different: since we know empirically that the brains of Tibetan monks in deep contemplation show regular alpha-wave patterns, it's easy to imagine environmental interventions, from light to sound to airflow to scent, designed to evoke the state of mindfulness, coupled to a body-monitor setting that helps you recognize when you've entered it.

If these scenarios present us with reason to be concerned about ubiquitous interventions, this doesn't necessarily mean we should forgo all such attempts to invest the world with computational power. It simply means that we have to be unusually careful about what we're doing, more careful certainly than we've been in the past. Because by and large, whatever frustrations our sojourns in the world present us with, we've had a long time to get used to them; to paraphrase Paul Robeson, we suits ourselves. Whatever marginal "improvement" is enacted by overlaying daily life with digital mediation has to be balanced against the risk of screwing up something that already works, however gracelessly or inelegantly.

Eliel SaarinenEero's father, and a professor of architecture in his own rightinvariably reminded his students that they must "[a]lways design a thing by considering it in its next larger context." The implications of this line of thought for everyware are obvious: In some particularly delicate circumstances, it would probably be wisest to leave well enough alone.