Divining a Digital Future: Mess and Mythology in Ubiquitous Computing (review)

Designers are often preoccupied with how technology is seamlessly incorporated into everyday experience. At one point, designers felt it was useful to start measuring the physical dimensions of human beings so that cars and office chairs would be easier to use. Later on, especially when computers began populating workplaces, some designers attempted to design based upon rather basic computational models of the mind. Over the last two decades, technology designers have become more interested in the social aspects of technology use. It is now very typical to find academics from anthropological and social science backgrounds working in teams with engineers, scientists and designers within the major technology organizations and universities.

The co-authors of this book have observed and experienced the bringing together of the social and computer science research communities from both disciplinary perspectives. Dourish, currently Professor of Informatics at University of California, Irvine, trained as a computer scientist and has been a part of research groups at a number of the world’s leading centers for computing research. Bell is a trained anthropologist who has worked at Intel for over a decade, studying the appropriation of new technologies in different cultural contexts. Despite coming from rather different disciplinary roots, both authors find themselves situated within the same frame of argument—that designers, engineers and scientists within computing-related disciplines would do well to pay more attention to the societal and cultural phenomena surrounding the use of technology.

In this book, Dourish and Bell bring their perspectives on HCI together on the specific subject of Ubiquitous Computing. For the uninitiated, Ubiquitous Computing—or “UbiComp” as it is often referred to by HCI experts (and I refer to it in this way here)—is an area of research that, broadly speaking, develops and studies technologies that permeate beyond the traditional confines of personal computers. As a paradigm of research, the origins of Ubiquitous Computing are typically associated with the work of Mark Weiser in the late 1980s, and in particular an article published in Scientific American wherein Weiser described his vision for “the computer for the 21st century.” [1] Weiser pictured a future where computers were omnipresent in peoples’ experiences but at the same time disappeared into the background: “They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.” In the article, Weiser declared that this would be an engineering challenge, one that requires lengthy collaboration with other disciplines; social scientists, ecological psychologists, artists and designers were all referred to in his writing. Dourish and Bell start off their contextualization of UbiComp with Weiser’s article, not necessarily as the first instantiation of the idea of computing “everywhere” but due to its formidable impact on computing research ever since. In the years following Weiser’s article, research groups developing ubiquitous technologies and pervasive computing systems started to emerge in key (mostly American) universities, and large conferences such as UbiComp and Pervasive [2] became important venues for disseminating the latest knowledge on the subject. The ubiquity of Weiser’s article lives on in the vast corpus of peer-reviewed papers archived from these conferences that directly cite his original article. Similarly, key ideas that Weiser introduced—small wearable tags, mobile pad-like screen devices, and large tabletop and wall-based interactive screens—are still central focal points of the UbiComp research community.

Dourish and Bell explain the above context in chapters 1 and 2 as, from their perspective, it is the legacy of Weiser’s work and more specifically his Scientific American article, that has supported the mythology of UbiComp. In Chapter 2 they go on to argue that this mythology is founded on the idea of a proximal future where technology will permeate everyday environments and, as Weiser argued, calmly enter the backdrop of our experiences. It seems, within the very Anglo-American-centered world of UbiComp research at least, that Weiser’s...