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By Root 452 0

reality turned inside out. So it matters quite a lot when we propose to embed functionality in all the surfaces the world affords us: we find ourselves deposited back in actuality with an almost-audible thump, and things work differently here. If you want to design a system that lets drive-through customers "tap and go" from the comfort of their cars, you had better ensure that the reader is within easy reach of a seated driver; if your building's smart elevator system is supposed to speed visitor throughput, it probably helps to ensure that the panel where people enter their floors isn't situated in a way that produces bottlenecks in the lobby.

Interpersonal interactions are also conditioned by the apparently trivial fact that they take place in real space. Think of all of the subtle, nonverbal cues we rely upon in the course of a multi-party conversation and how awkward it can be when those cues are stripped away, as they are in a conference call.

Some ubiquitous systems have made attempts at restoring these cues to mediated interactions—one of Hiroshi Ishii's earlier projects, for example, called ClearBoard. ClearBoard attempted to "integrate interpersonal space and shared workspace seamlessly"; it was essentially a shared digital whiteboard, with the important wrinkle that the image of a remote collaborator was projected onto it, "behind" what was being drawn on the board itself.

Not only did this allow partners working at a distance from one another to share a real-time workspace, it preserved crucial indicators like "gestures, head movements, eye contact, and gaze direction"—all precisely the sort of little luxuries that do so much to facilitate communication in immediate real space and that are so often lacking in the virtual.

A sensitively designed everyware will take careful note of the qualities our experiences derive from being situated in real space and time. The more we learn, the more we recognize that such cues are more than mere niceties—that they are, in fact, critical to the way we make sense of our interactions with one another.

Thesis 20

Everyware unavoidably invokes the specter of multiplicity.

One word that should bedevil would-be developers of everyware is "multiple," as in multiple systems, overlapping in their zones of influence; multiple inputs to the same system, some of which may conflict with each other; above all, multiple human users, each equipped with multiple devices, acting simultaneously in a given space.

As we've seen, the natural constraints on communication between a device and its human user imposed by a one-to-one interaction model mean that a PC never has to wonder whether I am addressing it, or someone or -thing else in our shared environment. With one application open to input at any given time, it never has to parse a command in an attempt to divine which of a few various possibilities I might be referring to. And conversely, unless some tremendously processor-intensive task has monopolized it for the moment, I never have to wonder whether the system is paying attention to me.

But the same thing can't really be said of everyware. The multiplicity goes both ways, and runs deep.

Perhaps my living room has two entirely separate and distinct voice-activated systems—say, the wall screen and the actual window—to which a command to "close the window" would be meaningful. How are they to know which window I mean?

Or maybe our building has an environmental control system that accepts input from personal body monitors. It works just fine as long as there's only one person in the room, but what happens when my wife's monitor reports that she's chilly at the same moment that mine thinks the heat should be turned down?

It's not that such situations cannot be resolved. Of course they can be. It's just that designers will have to explicitly anticipate such situations and devise rules to address them—something that gets exponentially harder when wallscreen and window, shirt telemetry and environmental control system, are all made by different parties.

Multiplicity in everyware