Everyware_ The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing - Adam Greenfield [23]
True utility in the digital room awaits a recognition that the networked whole is distinctly more than the sum of its parts. In contrast with such piecemeal conceptions, there have been others that approached the ubiquitous systems operating in a space as a unified whole.
The MIT Tangible Media Group's 1998 prototype ambientROOM was one such pioneering effort. Built into a free-standing Steelcase office cubicle of around fifty square feet, ambientROOM was nothing if not an exercise in holism: The entire space was considered as an interface, using lighting and shadow, sound cues, and even the rippled reflection of light on water to convey activity meaningful to the occupant. The sound of birdsong and rainfall varied in volume with some arbitrary quantity set by a user—both the "value of a stock portfolio" or the "number of unread e-mail messages" were proposed at the time*—while "active wallpaper" took on new qualities in reaction to the absence or presence of people in a nearby conference room.
* Conveying the quantity of unread e-mail is apparently an eternal goal of such systems, while explicitly calling out one's stock portfolio as something to be tracked by the minute seems to have been an artifact of the go-go, day-trading era in which ambientROOM was designed.
Projects like ambientROOM begin to suggest how systems made up of media hubs, wall-screens, networked refrigerators, and all the other appurtenances of room-scale everyware might work when designed in recognition of the person at their heart.
Some of the first to get a taste of this in real life have been high-margin frequent travelers. Since mid-2005, rooms at the Mandarin Oriental in New york have loaded preference files maintained on a central server when the hotel's best customers check in, customizing settings from the shades to the thermostat, lining up entertainment options, and loading frequently dialed numbers into the phone.* "Digital home" solutions that propose to do many of the same things in a domestic setting can be expected to reach the market in the near term, though whether they'll afford experiences of reasonably seamless ubiquity is debatable.
And so we see it cropping up again, here at the scale of the room, this pattern that may by now seem familiar to you: Our discussions of everyware have much less to do with some notional future than they do with a blunt inventory of products already finding their way to market.
* As you may have suspected, yes, the hotel does keep track of what you're watching. The potential for embarrassment is real, and is something we'll deal with extensively in Sections 6 and 7.
Thesis 14
Everyware acts at the scale of the building.
In this thesis and the next, which concerns the extension of everyware into public space, we reach scales where the ubiquitous deployment of processing starts to have consequences beyond ones we can easily envision. When we find networked intelligence operating at the scale of whole buildings, it doesn't even necessarily make sense to speak of how the everyware experience diverges from that of personal computing—these are places that people using PCs have rarely if ever been able to reach.
The idea of a building whose program, circulation, and even structure are deeply molded by flows of digital information is nothing new. As