Everyware_ The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing - Adam Greenfield [56]
You own the local system, whose tendrils reach from your refrigerator to the bathroom scale to the exercise monitor you wear to the gym. While it is constantly deriving precise numeric values for attributes like caloric intake and body-mass index, its findings are delivered to you not as raw data, but as gentle, high-level comments that appear on the bathroom mirror and the refrigerator door: "Run an extra ten minutes this morning," or "Try adding leafy greens to today's meals."
And while most of us, for obvious reasons, would not want something like this directly connected with the outside world, in this case your health-management system is interfaced with your household-management system. And it is the latter that is coupled, at levels beneath your awareness, to larger, external information-gathering efforts—those belonging to insurance companies, or marketers, or the Department of Health and Human Services.
These are two different manifestations of seamlessness, and both interfere with your ability to regulate the flow of information around you. Maybe you're actually curious to know exactly how many calories you burned today. More seriously, of course, is the problem posed by the obscure interconnection of apparently discrete systems. There we run into the same issue we saw with PayPass: that the decision made to shield the user from the system's workings also conceals who is at risk and who stands to benefit in a given transaction.
Given these potentials, there's something refreshing about the notion of making the seams and junctions that hold our technologies together at least optionally visible. In some sense, doing so would demolish the magical sense of effortlessness so many theories of ubiquitous design aim for, but that could always be switched back on, couldn't it?
I like the honesty of seamfulness, the way it invites users to participate in a narrative from which they had been foreclosed. In everyware as in life, good fences make good neighbors.
Thesis 41
Before they are knit together, the systems that comprise everyware may appear to be relatively conventional, with well-understood interfaces and affordances. When interconnected, they will assuredly interact in emergent and unpredictable ways.
Our information technology is difficult to consider holistically, because it is modular: Though its constituents work together, they are designed at different times, in different places, by different parties, to different ends. Furthermore, these constituents are agnostic as to the circumstances of their use: A database doesn't "care" whether it's used to enhance a rental car company's relationships with its best customers, manage a public housing authority's inventory of cleaning supplies, or keep tabs on the members of a particular ethnic group scattered through a larger population.
This modularity has historically been the very strength of information technology, at least in the years since the Internet raised notions of standardization and interoperability to wide currency in the industry. It lends our informatic systems an enormous degree of flexibility, adaptability, even vigor, and it will and should continue to do so.
But in our experiences of everyware, we'll also find that modularity will occasionally prove to be the cause of concern. Even where we recognize that certain high-level effects of ubiquitous systems are less comfortable for users than we might like, it will generally not be possible to address these effects at the level of component artifacts. Apart from those of literal imperceptibility, almost all of the issues we're interested in—the surfacing of previously latent information, the persistence lent ephemera by their encoding in mnemotechnical systems, certainly seamlessness—do not arise as a result of properties residing in components