• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Finally, exactly because of its historical pedigree in the field, the term comes with some baggage we might well prefer to dispense with. As HCI researcher Jonathan Grudin has argued, because "the computer is assumed [and] the user must be specified" even in phrases like "user-centered design," such terminology "retains and reinforces an engineering perspective" inimical to our present concerns.

I think we might be better served by a word that did a better job of evoking the full, nuanced dimensions of what is experienced by someone encountering everyware. The trouble is that most other candidate words succumb to the same trap that ensnares "user." They also elide one or more important aspects of this person's experience.

Of the various alternative terms that might be proposed, there is one that captures two aspects of the everyware case that happen to be in real tension with one another, both of which are necessary to account for: "subject."

On the one hand, a subject is someone with interiority, with his or her own irreducible experience of the world; one has subjectivity. But interestingly enough, we also speak of a person without a significant degree of choice in a given matter as being subject to something: law, regulation, change. As it turns out, both senses are appropriate in describing the relationship between a human being and the types of systems we're interested in.

But a moment's consideration tells us that "subject" is no good either. To my ears, anyway, it sounds tinny and clinical, a word that cannot help but conjure up visions of lab experiments, comments inscribed on clipboards by white-coated grad students. I frankly cannot imagine it being adopted for this purpose in routine speech, either by professionals in the field or by anyone else.

So we may be stuck with "user" after all, at least for the foreseeable future, no matter how inaccurate it is. Perhaps the best we can hope for is to remain acutely mindful of its limitations.

Thesis 19

Everyware is always situated in a particular context.

Nothing takes place in a vacuum. As former PARC researcher Paul Dourish observes, in his 2001 study Where the Action Is, "interaction is intimately connected with the settings in which it occurs." His theory of "embodied interaction" insists that interactions derive their meaning by occurring in real time and real space and, above all, among and between real people.

In Dourish's view, the character and quality of interactions between people and the technical systems they use depend vitally on the fact that both are embedded in the world in specific ways. A video chat is shaped by the fact that I'm sitting in this office, in other words, with its particular arrangement of chair, camera, and monitor, and not that one; whether a given gesture will seem to be an appropriate mapping to a system command will seem different depending on whether the user is Sicilian or Laotian or Senegalese.

This seems pretty commonsensical, but it's something that by and large we've been able to overlook throughout the PC era. This is because personal computing is something that we've historically conceived of as being largely independent of context.

In turning on your machine, you enter the nonspace of its interface—and that nonspace is identical whether your laptop is sitting primly atop your desk at work or teetering atop your knees on the library steps. Accessing the Web through such interfaces only means that the rabbit hole goes deeper; as William Gibson foresaw in the first few pages of Neuromancer, it really is as if each of our boxes is a portal onto a "consensual hallucination" that's always there waiting for us. No wonder technophiles of the early 1990s were so enthusiastic about virtual reality: it seemed like the next logical step in immersion.

By instrumenting the actual world, though, as opposed to immersing a user in an information-space that never was, everyware is something akin to virtual