Everyware_ The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing - Adam Greenfield [65]
What does any of this have to do with everyware? It suggests that we're about to experience a significant and unprecedented growth in the number of nonspecialists empowered to develop homebrew applications. It's crucial that the tools exist that allow us to do so, but still more important is a cultural context that not merely permits but encourages us to experiment—and that is just what the sense of ferment around mashups provides us.
Especially when combined with the revolution in conceptions of intellectual property that was originally sparked by the open-source and free software movements, we have everything necessary to democratize the development of information technology. What was not so very long ago a matter of a few thousand corporate and academic research centers will explode to encompass tens or even hundreds of millions of independent, unaffiliated developers scattered across the globe.
As a result, everyware is not going to be something simply vended to a passive audience by the likes of Intel and Samsung: What tools such as Ning tell us is that there will be millions of homebrew designer/makers developing their own modules of functionality, each of which will bear the hooks that allow it to be plugged into others.
Of course, not everyone will be interested in becoming a developer: The far greater proportion of people will continue to be involved with information technology primarily as users and consumers. And for the time being, anyway, the sheer complexity of ubiquitous systems will mitigate the otherwise strong turn toward amateurism that has characterized recent software development. But over the longer term, the centrifugal trend will be irresistible. The practice of technological development itself will become decisively decentralized, in a way that hasn't been true for at least a century.
Thesis 48
Those developing everyware may have little idea that this is in fact what they are doing.
Given how conventional a component system may appear before it is incorporated in some context we'd be able to recognize as everyware, we're led to a rather startling conclusion: Relatively few of the people engaged in developing the building blocks of ubiquitous systems will consciously think of what they're doing as such.
In fact, they may never have heard the phrase "ubiquitous computing" or any of its various cognates. They will be working, rather, on finer-grained problems: calibrating the sensitivity of a household sensor grid so that it recognizes human occupants but not the cat, or designing an RFID-equipped key fob so that it reads properly no matter which of its surfaces is brought into range of the reader. With such a tight focus, they will likely have little sense for the larger schemes into which their creations will fit.
This is not an indictment of engineers. They are given a narrow technical brief, and they return solutions within the envelope available to them—an envelope that is already bounded by material, economic, and time constraints. Generally speaking, it is not in their mandate to consider the "next larger context" of their work.
And if this is true of professional engineers, how much more so will it apply to all the amateurs newly empowered to develop alongside them? Amateurs have needs and desires, not mandates. They'll build tools to address the problem at hand, and inevitably some of these tools will fall under the rubric of everyware—but the amateur developers