Everyware_ The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing - Adam Greenfield [0]
The dawning age of ubiquitous computing
Adam Greenfield
Everyware: The dawning age of ubiquitous computing
Adam Greenfield
New Riders
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Copyright © 2006 by Adam Greenfield
Project Editor: Michael J. Nolan
Development Editor: Dan Littman
Production Editor: Hilal Sala
Copyeditor: Alan Reade
Compositor: Joan Olson
Indexer: Karin Arrigoni
Cover design: Alicia Buelow
Interior design: Joan Olson
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ISBN 0-321-38401-6
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed and bound in the United States of America
Contents
Introduction
Section 1: What is everyware?
Section 2: How is everyware different from what we're used to?
Section 3: What's driving the emergence of everyware?
Section 4: What are the issues we need to be aware of?
Section 5: Who gets to determine the shape of everyware?
Section 6: When do we need to begin preparing for everyware?
Section 7: How might we safeguard our prerogatives in an everyware world?
Conclusion
Index
For Nurri, just like honey
They built the world as we know it...
All the systems you traverse.
—The Fall, I Am Kurious Oranj
Introduction
1.
This book is an attempt to describe the form computing will take in the next few years. Specifically, it's about a vision of processing power so distributed throughout the environment that computers per se effectively disappear. It's about the enormous consequences this disappearance has for the kinds of tasks computers are applied to, for the way we use them, and for what we understand them to be.
Although aspects of this vision have been called a variety of names—ubiquitous computing, pervasive computing, physical computing, tangible media, and so on—I think of them as facets of one coherent paradigm of interaction that I call everyware.
In everyware, all the information we now look to our phones or Web browsers to provide becomes accessible from just about anywhere, at any time, and is delivered in a manner appropriate to our location and context.
In everyware, the garment, the room and the street become sites of processing and mediation. Household objects from shower stalls to coffee pots are reimagined as places where facts about the world can be gathered, considered, and acted upon. And all the familiar rituals of daily life—things as fundamental as the way we wake up in the morning, get to work, or shop for our groceries—are remade as an intricate dance