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.”

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