Divining a digital future: mess and mythology in ubiquitous computing

Critical Analysis

Chapter 1: The myth and mess of ubiquitous computing

In this chapter, the authors describe the history and promise of ubiquitous computing, drawing primarily from Xerox PARC’s research and visioning. This story of the future, they argue, is misleading and potentially dangerous; it acts as if technological ubiquity is inevitable, and as if it is uniformly considered positive.

The authors introduce PARC as the venue that “helped create new stories about how technology would fit into the world.” This focus was initially on the personal computer: how it would emerge from a focus on mainframe computing and then enter the workplace. These were myths, not in the sense that they were false but in the sense that they were stories with “heroes, seemingly impossible tasks, perils, pitfalls, dangers, and of course, in the end, glory.”

The authors then pull heavily from the work and writing of Mark Weiser (particularly from an article from 1991 in Scientific America), an influential computer scientist at PARC, who established a great deal of the myths around computing in everyday parts of life. These are the “stories that motivate and celebrate the development of the ubicomp agenda.” The stories ignore the messy reality and tension of all innovation, and that is problematic.

Chapter 2: Contextualizing Ubiquitous Computing

In this chapter, the authors document and explore the historic roots of ubiquitous computing in more detail, focusing on the manner in which the ubicomp agenda is presented unproblematically.

Ubiquitous computing as a goal assumes that personal computing is too technologically obvious, with people having to interact with the machine in order to get things done. This follows that an orderliness or “calmness” could emerge, if computing was done differently. Weiser’s focus was on task-based computing in an office environment, all working together, and the vision was presented as if the future was inevitable; “one has the sense that he is telling the reader, ‘This is coming, so you had better be ready.’” Weiser used a rhetorical device of a story of the future to help people imagine what was coming, and the authors describe that his work was successful.

Another perspective is articulated by Suchman, who offered a different frame for thinking about design in the context of computing. Rather than emphasizing task accomplishment with invisible computation, she looked at the power relationships at work in the way people engaged with computing and each other through computing. Another view was that of Rogers, who “maintains that a notion of ubiquitous or calm computing that withdraws into the periphery fails to create the kinds of expansive, playful and engaging experiences that promote human participation in new domains.”

The authors point to these and other conflicting perspectives as their source of inquiry: how the different futures and perspectives are imagined, and how they come to life. This is considered in the context of framing points. Ubicomp is presented continually as a “proximate future” that is just around the corner. This means that it can never be achieved, and perhaps can never then be fully critiqued or analyzed, and that permits those involved in ubicomp to “absolve themselves of responsibilities for the present.” Underlying all of the proximate vision is a claim that an interconnected world of the future is perfect, and this fails to recognize the seams and mess of the infrastructure. These ideas are questioned through two possibilities: that ubicomp can never actually happen, or that it has already happened.

Next, the authors describe the messiness that’s inherent in ubicomp, but often ignored; it is presented as “calm computing,” as if that background infrastructure never shows itself. Of course, infrastructure always shows itself; an example of a public and urban sewer system shows that for some, it is utility, while for others, it is a work site, localized, and variable. “Infrastructures are always already messy” and a future of computing everywhere needs to understand that. The mess is “a relationship between technology, people, and practice.”

Ubiquitous computing is typically presented as tied to design, and “design is seen as the natural end point of research activity; that is, the kinds of understanding derived from research are evaluated primarily in terms of the contributions they might make to the production of artifacts.” PARC’s slogan “Build what you use, use what you build” indicates that design (and production) is the goal, and understanding is not. The authors argue that the mess of infrastructure is not something to be cleaned. It is a “critical contextualizing remark for helping to understand the limits and conditions on design.” The mess is tangled with power relations.

Chapter 3: Making Room for the Social and Cultural

In this chapter, the authors introduce the ideas of “social” and “cultural” as frames for exploring technological advancement. They describe that traditional views of anthropology focused on taxonomies, categorization, and understanding what happens as a consequence of technological changes. Instead of taking this perspective, the authors’ goal is to understand the context in which change begins or occurs: the types of social and cultural containers that exist and help encourage certain types of technological prioritization and development.

The authors offer a history of ethnographic research, and the shift of anthropological inquiry towards understanding how members of a culture shape and experience the world. Notably, the Chicago School, and Strauss and Becker (among others), explored subcultures and outsider groups, bringing anthropological study into everyday life “closer to home” (to Western readers). When technology is examined in this way, social inquiry is shifted from the impacts of a new information and communication offering to “the underlying constraints that technologies introduce.” Looking at outcomes examines consequences, but “what this misses is the social context within which the technology was designed and produced in the first place.”

Culture is a “semiotic system” and in thinking of it this way, “we are forced to recognize that each of us pulls from many cultural systems in order to understand our worlds.” This is a generative view, contrary to a taxonomic view, which claims that “we encounter the world through cultural lenses, which bring it into focus in particular ways while also rendering it meaningful and accountable to us. These lenses frame what we see, and how we see and understand it.” The idea of being a person, and the idea of identity, “arises out of a complicated negotiation of ritual and profane activities.” The authors quote Gertz in describing culture as “stories we tell ourselves about ourselves,” and Miller and Slater in how technologies help people “deliver on pledges they have already made to themselves about themselves.”

Chapter 4: A Role for Ethnography - Methodology and Theory

In this chapter, the authors describe the role of ethnographic research in the process of design. They emphasize that ethnography is typically used (if it is used at all) as a way of generating requirements for design, and that this fails to recognize the methodological commitments of this form of research.

The term “methodology” is used in the text to describe the “epistemological foundations of the discipline” and what the use of specific approaches indicates as intellectual commitments of the researchers (and what it signals about their intellectual priorities). Referencing Smith, they argue that selecting a methodology from another discipline comes with baggage: “when you use an idea from somewhere else, he suggests, you need to be able to say what you paid for it, how you brought it home, and what kinds of damage it suffered along the way.” Common use of ethnography does not reference these considerations, as it has “come to be regarded as a toolbox of methods, divorced from a larger set of theoretical and methodological concerns that give it form and rigor.” The way these methods then are typically used is even more problematic, as they are leveraged solely as ways of identifying problems that can be fixed through the design of new technologies; ethnography is seen as a “process of going out and finding facts lying around in the world, dusting them off, and bringing them home to inform, educate, and delight.”

The authors describe that ethnography is inherently interpretative, and the output is written; “writing, then, is central and the ethnography is not itself the project; the written form is its final outcome.” Writing focuses on eccentricities and “strategically chosen exemplars,” and ethnographers are positioned as, quoting Geertz, “merchants of astonishment.” The authors view this as positive, as “moments of surprise or astonishment in which the audience/readers are forced to challenge their current framing of a situation does not always sit comfortably within a research structure that favors stable questions and research problems.”

Ethnographies are interpretative artifacts, and they highlight a gap between what people say they are doing or will be doing, and the actions they currently undertake. It focuses on lived and embodied experiences, “the articulation of aspirations and cultural ideals along with all the spaces in between.”

The authors conclude the chapter by confirming that part of the value of ethnography is, in fact, generating implications for design, but these are in “consequential, profound, and direct guidance for how to think about the issues” not of any one technology but of the experiences people have in the world around them. Expecting ethnographic research to generate lists of requirements is a “request for empiricism.” The methodology is interpretative and analytic, not objective in a traditional positivist manner. It offers “new framing for the questions rather than a specific set of design guidelines.” Ethnography is conceptual and imaginative.

Chapter 5: What Lies Beneath

In this chapter, the authors describe the messiness of infrastructure as space. They focus on infrastructure as a sociopolitical idea of institutional relationships, and infrastructure as experiential: how people experience spaces. The authors argue that infrastructure is made visible in simple, everyday ways which shape experiences, and experiences subsequently shape spatial infrastructure.

People experience space as layers of human and technological infrastructure; this includes physical architectures but also conceptual ones like naming, interaction, and so-on. A place can be viewed as both a specific instance, as well as a “particular sort of place,” and this is professional visioning.

An art gallery is used as an example of a dynamic, constructed and negotiated space of infrastructure. The space changes and is configured and reconfigured continually based on the people in it; “people dynamically construct collaborative encounters” which are choreographed by the people and the space. “Spaces are inhabited. Actions are not merely ‘played out’ in space; they serve to structure and organize the space. The movements of people—the places they gather and those they avoid, the places they talk and the places they sleep—structure space; the logics of space are enacted in and through everyday life.”

Space, then, is a set of layered infrastructures that underpin what is happening, and what is happening is often everyday-like; it is boring and regular. A cultural script emerges, built by and with those in the space, and so “everyday space is not experienced neutrally; it is experienced as inhabited, with all that entails.” The space is infrastructure, with the physicality of lesser importance than those of “naming, movement, [and] interaction.” But infrastructures are fragile, and that means that those who participate in them need to continually work to stabilize them. Infrastructure can become a backdrop, but only through that management and through well-understood practice within a space and place. The “rhetoric of seamlessness is often opposed to the inherently fragmented nature of social and cultural encounters with spaces.”

Chapter 7: Rethinking Privacy

In this chapter, the authors position privacy as an embodied and enacted cultural practice that, among other things, signals participation in a group and an understanding and respect for unique norms and group expectations; it is not a technical attribute as much as an underpinning to how people understand and negotiate their engagement with a culture and community, and how they then contribute to building and refining that community. Information sharing is a “means of cultural production, a way in which people engage in meaningful social interaction and negotiation of collective meaning.”

One view of privacy is that an individual has things that are private and public, and they have the right (and then obligation) to control that delineation in practice. This is a transactional or economic metaphor, that being public has both risk and reward, and there is a cost and benefit of sharing information. An alternative is that privacy and security are used in a discursive manner, to separate acceptable actions from unacceptable actions; acceptability is, in this way of thinking, security. Privacy is “linked to larger sets of social and regulatory forces and is understood as an evolving set of cultural inclinations.” Lying is a privacy practice, as is participation as a choice.

Referencing Melican and Faulkner, the authors offer a hierarchical view of privacy, moving from content and preference (as most “classified”) through profiling information, consumption patterns, and then friends and family. At stake in the hierarchy is “reputation, trust, and identity politics.” Selecting what can be made public as risky or not risky is “not a purely rational or objective process but rather reflects cultural, political, and moral judgements… different social collectives will have different interpretations of risk depending on their position relative to the social structures that might be in question.” A community defines risk of publicness, and in doing so also defines acceptable and unacceptable behavior. The definition is collective, and is “continually reproduced in everyday social behavior.”

The authors present secrecy, identity, and affiliation with a group as being related ideas, where sharing and keeping secrets manages and shows membership; the boundaries around membership, and the adherence to those boundaries through secrets shared within, “simultaneously cement a bond between those who share them while marking their differences from those with whom the secrets and not shared.” Flow of information reinforces these boundaries and exclusivity in participation; “secrets are used to reinforce and rebel against authority relationships.” Perhaps more important than the content of the information itself is the understanding of how to manage that information: what is considered socially acceptable to share, and with whom. Learning and exhibiting these norms is a form of indoctrination to a group; “normative information practices define and mark group membership.” The idea of privacy is more about accountability than the risk and reward of hiding things, and is driven less by the fear of being exposed and more about the fear of social pressures to share or not share things.

The authors argue, in conclusion, that privacy is not a stable attribute, or even an attribute at all. It is a negotiated and continually managed boundary that provides and delineates membership in a group. Privacy practices are “means by which people collectively understand the world” and are social products, not immutable facts.

Research Value

The value of this work in informing my own research is that it:

• Says we are teaching designers to assume calm infrastructure instead of a mess
• Identifies that when we explore visions of the future and tell stories of those visions, we present impossible futures and ignore implications of the infrastructure
• Proposes that a part of innovation risk may be in how we frame and count on dependency. A risk is not only in market adoption, but in how much the change requires calmness instead of messiness
• Offers perspectives on how people form identity and views of themselves
• Shows studio as a place where students begin to look at things through different lenses, encouraged by instructors (is all education this?)
• Positions studio as a technology, and provokes a conversation of the context in which that technology emerges and flourishes, as compared to the consequences of that technology existing
• Casts designers who take this approach as rebels, capable of seeing the world differently through their interpretation; in teaching students methods of qualitative research tied to innovation, we are urging them to view their analytic contributions as exclusive
• Positions design researchers, who learn to leverage edge cases to challenge an audience, as taking on rebellious qualities
• Challenges what we teach in design studio; if we claim user-centricity and purport to teach methods of qualitative research, strong outcomes should be to not design or make things
• Positions studio as space as infrastructure, framing “going to studio” as both going to a place and an instance of a place (and activating or unlocking the space-ness)
• Describes the nature of studio as enacted; simply providing a building is not a studio, and not having a building may still have studio-ness qualities
• Opens an opportunity to question the fundamentals further (what studio infrastructure is actually required, and what is legacy, and what can never be formalized anyway?)
• Describes that students become part of the community of designers in part by learning and respecting the relationships of sharing things publicly with the group
• Connects designerly identity formation with the willingness of a student to be public or private in certain ways and with certain people
• Shifts the focus of “artful surfaces” or externalization from a tool used in problem solving to one that signifies and requests participation in the group
• Reframes students who refuse to work in studio, or that aren’t provided with a studio to work within, as outcasts or ineffective members of the group
• Questions how younger students have been creative in public, and how they have then practiced the idea of establishing, knowing, and conforming to social public boundaries
• Questions my own views (and the views of professors in my previous study) related to fear of being public as less of a fear of personal skill, and more of a fear of being excluded from a group (which is then somewhat self-fulfilling)