Everyware_ The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing - Adam Greenfield [7]
Workers wearing Active Badges in an instrumented building could automatically unlock areas to which they had been granted access, have phone calls routed to them wherever they were, and create running diaries of the meetings they attended. They could also be tracked as they moved around the building; at one point, Olivetti's public Web site even allowed visitors to query the location of an employee wearing an Active Badge. And while the intent wasn't to spy on such workers, it was readily apparent how the system could be abused, especially when the device responsible was so humble and so easy to forget about. Original sin came early to ubicomp.
Want went on to join Mark Weiser's team at PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), where he contributed to foundational work on a range of networked devices called "tabs," "pads," and "boards." As with Active Badge, these were digital tools for freely roaming knowledge workers, built on a vocabulary of form universally familiar to anyone who's ever worked in an office: name tags, pads of paper, and erasable whiteboards, respectively.*
* These form factors had been looming in the mass unconscious for a long time. PARC's "pad," in particular, seemed to owe a lot to the slablike media/communication devices used by astronauts Frank Poole and Dave Bowman in Stanley Kubrick's 1968 classic 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Each had a recognizable domain of function. Tabs, being the smallest, were also the most personal; they stayed close to the body, where they might mediate individual information such as identity, location and availability. Pads were supposed to be an individual's primary work surface, pen-based devices for documents and other personal media. And boards were wall-sized displays through which personal work could be shared, in a flow of discovery, annotation and commentary.
Networking infrastructure throughout the office itself enabled communication among the constellation of tabs, pads and boards in active use, allocating shared resources like printers, routing incoming e-mails and phone calls, and providing background maintenance and security functions. Documents in progress would follow a worker into and out of meetings, up onto public boards for discussion, and back down to one's own pad for further revision.
Part of the reasoning behind this was to replace the insular, socially alienating PC with something that afforded the same productivity. In this, PARC anticipated by half a decade the casual, and casually technical, workspace that did in fact emerge during the late-1990s ascendancy of the dot-coms. At least in theory, by getting people out from behind their screens, tabs and pads and boards lent themselves to an open, fluid, and collaborative work style.
Although none of these devices was ever commercialized, at least by Xerox, the die had been cast. Many of the ubicomp projects that followed took PARC's assumptions more or less as givens, as researchers turned their efforts toward enabling the vision of collaborative, distributed work embedded in it.
But what about that percentage of our lives we spend outside the confines of work? While it was more or less inevitable that efforts would be made to provision objects outside the workplace with a similar capacity for digital mediation—if for no other reason than the attractively high margins and immense volume of the consumer-electronics sector—it took longer for them to appear.
To understand why such efforts took so long to get off the ground, it's necessary to reconstruct for a moment what the world looked like at the very dawn of ubicomp. As strange as it now seems, the early conceptual work in the field happened in a world without a Web or, for that matter, widespread adoption of mobile phones in North