Everyware_ The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing - Adam Greenfield [13]
We all have an idea what "everyday life" means, though of course the details will be different for each of us. your conception might be organized around work: rushing to catch the train, delivering a convincing presentation to your colleagues, and remembering to pick up the dry cleaning on the way home. Someone else's might reside primarily in frustrations like paying the phone bill, or waiting in stalled traffic on the freeway.
My own sense of everyday life resides in less stressful moments, like strolling through the neighborhood after dinner with my wife, meeting friends for a drink, or simply gazing out the window onto the life of the city. However the overall tenor diverges, though, we have this much in common: We all know what it's like to bathe and dress, eat and socialize, make homes and travel between them.
Our lives are built from basic, daily operations like these. We tend to think of them as being somehow interstitial to the real business of a life, but we wind up spending much of our time on earth engaged in them. And it's precisely these operations that everyware proposes to usefully augment, out here in the rough-and-tumble of ordinary existence, in what I've elsewhere called "the brutal regime of the everyday." It aims to address questions as humble, and as important, as "Where did I leave my keys?" "Will I be warm enough in this jacket?" "What's the best way to drive to work this morning?"
As unheroic as they are, the transactions of everyday life would hardly seem to require technical intervention. It seems strange to think of managing them through an interface of digital mediation, or indeed applying any technology beyond the most basic to their enrichment. And yet that is where computing currently appears to be headed.
The stakes are high. But troublingly—especially given the narrow window of time we have in which to make meaningful choices about the shape of everyware—a comprehensive understanding of what the options before us really mean has been hard to come by.
In the rest of this book, we'll attempt to offer just that. We'll start by examining how everyware differs from the information technology we've become accustomed to. We'll prise out, in some detail, what is driving its emergence and try to get a handle on some of the most pressing issues it confronts us with. We'll sum it all up by asking who gets to determine the shape of everyware's unfolding, how soon we need to be thinking about it, and finally, and perhaps most importantly, what we can do to improve the chance that as it appears, it does so in ways congenial to us.
Section 2.
How is Everyware Different from What We're Used to?
In Section 1, we discussed the idea that a paradigm shift in the way we use computing is upon us. In its fullest sense, this shift is both an exodus from the PC as a standalone platform and a remaking of everyday life around the possibilities of information processing.
But how, specifically, is this different from the computing we've gotten used to? What does everyware look like from the other side of the transition?
Thesis 09
Everyware has profoundly different implications for the user experience than previous paradigms.
Contemporary designers of digital products and services speak of the "user experience": in other words, how does it feel to use this?
Where complex technological artifacts are concerned, such experiences arise from the interplay of a great many factors, subjective ones and those which are more objectively quantifiable. Consistently eliciting good user experiences means accounting for the physical design of the human interface, the flow of interaction between user and device, and the larger context in which that interaction is embedded.
In not a single one of these dimensions is the experience of everyware anything