Everyware_ The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing - Adam Greenfield [53]
If we are ever to regard the appearance of computing in everyday life as anything more than an annoyance, though, someone will have to do just this sort of thing. Someone will have to model fuzzy, indirect, imprecise behaviors. Someone will have to teach systems to regard some utterances as signal and some as noise, some facts as significant and some as misdirection, some gestures as compulsive tics and yet others as meaningful commands.
These are clearly not trivial things to expect. In fact, challenges of this order are often called "AI-hard"—that is, a system capable of mastering them could be construed as having successfully met the definition of artificial human intelligence. Simply describing everyday situations in useful detail would utterly tax contemporary digital design practice and most of the methodological tools it's built on.
Again, I am not expressing the sentiment that we should not attempt to design systems graceful enough for everyday life. I am simply trying to evoke the magnitude of the challenges faced by the designers of such systems. If nothing else, it would be wise for us all to remember that, while our information technology may be digital in nature, the human beings interacting with it will always be infuriatingly and delightfully analog.
Thesis 38
Everyware is problematic because it is hard to see literally.
Like bio- and nanotechnology, everyware is a contemporary technics whose physical traces can be difficult or even impossible to see with the unaided eye.
It's a minuscule technology. Its material constituents are for the most part sensors, processors, and memory chips of centimeter scale or smaller, connected (where they require physical connections at all) via printed, woven, or otherwise conformal circuitry.
It's a dissembling technology: those constituents are embedded in objects whose outer form may offer no clue as to their functionality.
It's also, of course, a wireless technology, its calls and responses riding through the environment on modulated radio waves.
All of these qualities make everyware quite hard to discern in its particulars—especially as compared to earlier computing paradigms with their obvious outcroppings of High Technology.
We should get used to the idea that there will henceforth be little correlation between the appearance of an artifact and its capabilities—no obvious indications as to how to invoke basic functionality nor that the artifact is capable of doing anything at all. When even a space that appears entirely empty may in fact contain—to all intents, may be—a powerful information processing system, we can no longer rely on appearances to guide us.
Thesis 39
Everyware is problematic because it is hard to see figuratively.
If its physical constituents are literally too small, too deeply buried, or too intangible to be made out with the eye, there are also other (and potentially still more decisive) ways in which everyware is hard to see clearly.
This quality of imperceptibility is not simply a general property of ubiquitous systems; for the most part, rather, it's something that has deliberately been sought and worked toward. As we've seen, the sleight of hand by which information processing appears to dissolve into everyday behavior is by no means easy to achieve.
There are two sides of this, of course. On the one hand, this is what Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown set out as the goal of their "calm technology": interfaces that do not call undue attention to themselves, interactions that are allowed to remain peripheral. If a Weiserian calm technology appears as the result of a consciously pursued strategy of disappearance, it does so because its designers believed that this was the best way to relieve the stress engendered by more overt and attention-compelling interfaces.
But if they contain enormous potential for good, such disappearances can also conceal what precisely is at issue in a given transaction, who stands to benefit from it and whose interests are at risk. MasterCard, for example, clearly hopes