Thesis 72

Even acknowledging their contingency, some explicit set of principles would be highly useful to developers and users both.

Almost all of the available literature on ubiquitous computing is academic. That is, it emerges from the methods and viewpoints of applied science as it is practiced in the collective institution of higher education.

As part of their immersion in the scientific method, academics are trained to be descriptive. A proper academic paper in the sciences is neither proscriptive nor prescriptive; it expresses no opinion about what should or should not happen. Much of the discourse around ubiquitous computing has to date been of the descriptive variety: This is a system we contemplate engineering; this is how far we were able to get with it; this is where our assumptions broke down.

But however useful such descriptive methodologies are, they're not particularly well suited to discussions of what ought to be (or ought not to be) built.

This is not to say that such discussions do not take placeof course they do, whether in person over a cold beer, on electronic mailing lists, or in any of the fora where people working in the field gather. The debates I've been lucky enough to witness are learned, wise, contentious, impassioned, occasionally hysterically funny...but they rarely seem to show up in the literature, except as traces. The realism and the critical perspective so often vividly present in these discussions are lost to the record, all but invisible to anyone who only knows ubiquitous computing through conference proceedings and published work.

There have been attempts to return this perspective to written discussions of ubiquitous systems, some more successful than others. Thinkers as varied as the sociologist and anthropologist Anne Galloway, the industrial design provocateurs Dunne & Raby, and symposiarch John Thackara of the Doors of Perception conferences have all considered the question of pervasive computing from a critical perspective. I read Paul Dourish's Where the Action Is, particularly, as a passionate call to strip away the layers and layers of abstraction that so often prevent computing from benefiting the people it is intended to serve, people whose choices are both limited and given meaning by their being-in-the-world. But even this most literate of ubicomp writings is not enoughor is, at least, insufficiently explicit to help the working designer.

And that really is the issue: The working designer may not have the inclination, and definitely does not have the time, to trawl Heidegger for insight into the system they are bringing into being. Anybody working under the pressures and constraints of contemporary technology-development practice will need relatively clear-cut principles to abide by and to wield in discussions with the other members of their team.

Moreover, such guidelines would be of clear utility to those procuring and using everyware. If there is a compact, straightforward, and widely agreed-upon set of guidelines, then a given system's compliance with them could be verified and certified for all to see by something analogous to an interoperability mark. We could trust, in encountering such a system, that every practical measure had been taken to secure the maintenance or extension of our prerogatives.

This is just what all of our explorations have been building toward. After considering its definition, its origins, its likely implications, and the timing of its arrival, we are now ready to articulate five principles for the ethical development of everyware, even as we acknowledge that any such set of principles is bound to be contingent, provisional, and incomplete at best.

One final note: While these principles do aim to provide both developers and users with a useful degree of clarity, they do not spell solutions out in detail. Given the early stage of everyware's evolution, and especially everything we've learned about the futility of evaluating a system when it's been decontextualized and stripped of its specific referents to the real world, the principles focus not on how to achieve a given set of ends, but on what ends we should be pursuing in the first place.