• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 545 0

apparatus. But also politicians eager to seem tough on terror, ever aware that being seen to vote in favor of enhanced security will be remembered at election time. Private security firms and renta-cops of all sorts. Building and facility managers with a healthy line item in their budget to provide for the acquisition of gear but neither the ongoing funds nor the authority to hire security staff. Again, the manufacturers and vendors of that gear, scenting another yawning opportunity. And never least, us, you and I, unable to forget the rubble at Ground Zero, spun senseless by routine Amber Alerts and rumors of Superdome riots, and happy for some reassurance of safety no matter how illusory.

These are obviously thorny, multisided issues, in which the legitimate prerogatives of public safety get tangled up with the sort of measures we rightfully associate with tyranny. There should be no doubt, though, that everyware's ability to facilitate the collection and leveraging of large bodies of data about a population in the context of security will be a major factor driving its appearance.

Thesis 31

Everyware is a strategy for the reduction of cognitive overload.

Happily, there are also less distressing arguments in support of everyware. One of the original motivations for conducting research into post-PC interfaces, in fact, was that they might ameliorate the sense of overload that so often attends the use of information technology.

An early culmination of this thinking was Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown's seminal "The Coming Age of Calm Technology," which argued that the ubiquity of next-generation computing would compel its designers to ensure that it "encalmed" its users. In their words, "if computers are everywhere, they better stay out of the way."

While part of Brown and Weiser's apparent stance—that designers and manufacturers would find themselves obliged to craft gentle interfaces just because it would clearly be the sensible and humane thing to do—may now strike us as naive, they were onto something.

They had elsewhere diagnosed computer-mediated information overload and its attendant stress, as some of the least salutary aspects of contemporary life. Even residing, as they then did, in an age before the widespread adoption of mobile phones in North America, they could foresee that the total cognitive burden imposed by a poorly designed ubicomp on the average, civilian user would be intolerable. (One wonders to what degree daily life at PARC in the early nineties prefigured the inbox/voicemail clamor we've all since grown so used to.) And so they set for themselves the project of how to counter such tendencies.

The strategy they devised to promote calm had to do with letting the user shift back and forth between the focus of attention and what they called the "periphery"—that which "we are attuned to without attending to explicitly." Just as, in your peripheral vision you may see objects but not need to attend to them (or even necessarily be consciously aware of their presence), here the periphery was a place where information could reside until actively required.

To design systems that "inform without overburdening," though, you'd need to call upon a different set of interface modes than the conventional PC keyboard and mouse. Brown and weiser thought input modes like these were a big part of the problem; roy want and his co-authors, in a 2002 paper, flatly state that "[n]ondesktop interface modalities, such as pen, speech, vision, and touch, are attractive" to the enlightened interface designer "because they require less of a user's attention than a traditional desktop interface."*

* The presence of "speech" on this list, and in so many depictions that come after, is interesting. Mark Weiser explicitly excluded voice-recognition interfaces from his vision of ubiquitous computing, pointing out that it would be "prominent and attention-grabbing" in precisely the way that "a good tool is not."

The ideal system would be one which was imperceptible until required, in which the user's focus fell not