Everyware_ The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing - Adam Greenfield [55]
Chalmers and MacColl decided to reintroduce the notion of beautiful seams, challenging the whole discourse of smooth continuity they found to be endemic in contemporary models of ubicomp. But while they were among the earliest critics of seamlessness, they were far from alone in their discomfort with the notion, at least if the frequency with which their work on seamful design is cited is any indication.
Critics were motivated by several apparent flaws in the staging of seamless presentations. The most obvious was dishonesty: The infrastructure supporting the user's experience is deeply heterogeneous, and, at least in contemporary, real-world systems, frequently enough held together by the digital equivalent of duct tape and chewing gum. In Chalmers and MacColl's words, ubiquitous devices and infrastructural components "have limited sampling rates and resolution, are prone to communication delays and disconnections, have finite data storage limits and have representational schemes of finite scope and accuracy"; any attempt to provide the user with a continuous experience must somehow paper over these circumstances.
More worrisome than simple dishonesty, though, is the paternalism involved: seamlessness deprives the user of meaningful participation in the decisions that affect his or her experience. The example often given by Chalmers, in his discussion of the distinctions between seamlessness and its inverse, is that of a mobile phone user: In most such cases, information such as differentials in signal strength between adjacent cells, or the location of boundaries at which a phone is "handed over" from one cell to another, is inaccessible, handled automatically at a level beneath presentation in the interface.
While such information is probably useless, or even annoying, to most users at most times, it surely might prove desirable for some users at some times. By extension, most ubiquitous systems will involve the sort of complexity that designers are ordinarily tempted to sweep under the rug, secure in the wisdom that "users don't care about that." No matter how correct this determination may be in most cases, or how well-intentioned the effort to shield the user, there should always be some accommodation for those wishing to bring the full scope of a system's complexity to light.
Another critical flaw in seamlessness was also first raised by Chalmers and MacColl, and it related to the question of appropriation. Drawing on the earlier work of Paul Dourish and Steve Harrison, they questioned whether a system that was presented to users as seamless could ever afford those users the sense of ownership so critical to rewarding experiences of technology.
Dourish and Harrison offered as an object lesson the distinction between two early videoconferencing systems, from Bellcore Labs and Xerox PARC. The Bellcore system, videoWindow, was an extremely sophisticated effort in supporting "copresence"; it was complex and expensive, and it presented itself to users monolithically. In Dourish and Harrison's words, "it wasn't theirs, and they could not make it theirs." By contrast, users could and did play with the Xerox system, based as it was on cheap, portable cameras. Predictably enough, those who used the Xerox effort found that it "offered something wonderful," while the designers of videoWindow could only lamely conclude from their disappointing trials that their system "lack[ed] something due to factors we do not understand."
Chalmers and MacColl drew from this the inference that systems presented as seamless would be difficult to appropriate, claim and customize in the ways that seem to make people happiest. visible seams, by contrast, expose the places where users can "reach into" a system and tune it to their preference.
The resonance of such critiques will only grow as ubiquitous systems get closer to everyday reality, because the discourse of seamlessness