Everyware_ The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing - Adam Greenfield [11]
From this point forward, the transaction proceeds in the conventional manner: the reader queries the network for authorization, compares the amount of the purchase in question with the availability of funds on hand, and confirms or denies the purchase. And all of that happens in the space of 0.2 seconds: far less than a single heartbeat, and, as MasterCard clearly counts on, not nearly enough time to consider the ramifications of what we've just done.
Intel Research's Elizabeth Goodman argues that, "[t]he promise of computing technology dissolving into behavior, invisibly permeating the natural world around us cannot be reached," because "technology is...that which by definition is separate from the natural." In the face of technologies like PayPass, though, I wonder whether she's right. I don't think it's at all unlikely that such transactions will effectively become invisible—at least, for most of us, most of the time.
I do, however, think it's of concern. If this dissolving into behavior is the Holy Grail of a calm and unobtrusive computing, it's also the crux of so many of the other issues which ought to unsettle us—simultaneously everyware's biggest promise, and its greatest challenge.
Thesis 06
There are many rationales for the move away from the PC, any one of which would have been sufficient on its own.
At this point, you may well be wondering about the "why" of all this. Why embed computing in everyday objects? Why reinvent thoroughly assimilated habits and behaviors around digital mediation? Above all, why give up the settled and familiar context of the PC for a wild and unruly user environment, rivaling in complexity the knottiest and most difficult problems human beings have ever set up for themselves?
As you might suspect, there's no one answer. Part of the reason that the emergence of everyware seems so inevitable to me is that there are a great many technical, social, and economic forces driving it, any one of which would probably have been sufficient on its own.
Certainly, Mark Weiser's contingent at PARC wanted to push computation into the environment because they hoped that doing so judiciously might ameliorate some less pleasant aspects of a user experience that constantly threatened to spin out of control. As Weiser and co-author John Seely Brown laid out in a seminal paper, "The Coming Age of Calm Technology," they wanted to design tools to "encalm as well as inform." Similar lines of argument can be adduced in the work of human-centered design proponents from Don Norman onward.
Much of the Japanese work along ubiquitous lines, and in parallel endeavors such as robotics, is driven by the recognition that an aging population will require not merely less complicated interfaces, but outboard memory augmentation—and Japan is far from the only place with graying demographics. Gregory Abowd's Aware Home initiative at Georgia Tech is probably the best-known effort to imagine a ubicomp that lets the elderly safely and comfortably "age in place."
Ranjit Makkuni might argue that well-crafted tangible interfaces are not merely less intimidating to the non-technically inclined but are, in fact, essential if we want to provide for the needs of the world's billion or more non-literate citizens.
The prospect of so many new (and new kinds of) sensors cannot help but beguile those groups and individuals, ever with us, whose notions of safety—or business models—hinge on near-universal surveillance. Law-enforcement and public-safety organizations planetwide can be numbered among them, as well as the ecosystem of vendors, consultants, and other private concerns that depend on them for survival.
Beyond these, it would