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And although it frequently seems that each day's newspaper brings word of another large-scale Internet access initiative—from Philadelphia's effort to provide a blanket of free municipal Wi-Fi to Google's similar endeavor on behalf of San Francisco—the network infrastructure so necessary to these visions simply does not exist yet in most places.

Even in the United States, broadband penetration is significantly less than total, and as of the end of 2005, many Internet users still eke by with dial-up connections. The problem is particularly exacerbated in areas far from the dense urban cores, where the possibility of ever being fully wired—let alone richly provided with overlapping areas of wireless service—is simply out of the question. Given the economics involved, even in an age of satellite broadband, it's been speculated that some analogue of the Tennessee valley Authority's Rural Electrification Program of the 1930s might be necessary if universal high-speed connectivity is ever to be a reality.

Newer technologies like WiMAX, especially as used to support mesh networks, show every sign of addressing these issues, but we'll have to wait for their scheduled deployment during 2006-2007 to see whether they make good on the claims of their proponents. Unless these challenges can be resolved, all we'll ever be able to build is a computing that is indeed ubiquitous, but only in some places.

If this sounds like an absurdity, it isn't. Many of these places will be domains large enough for the bulk of our social and experiential concerns to come into play: corporate and university campuses, even entire cities. It may simply be some time before these concerns are fully relevant to the majority of people, even in the developed nations.

Finally, though raising this point may sound an odd note here, we should never forget that many human places abide without electricity, running water, or sewerage, let alone Internet access. As much as I believe that information is power, there's no question that shelter, safe drinking water and sanitation come first—on Maslow's pyramid and in any development scheme I'd want to endorse. Whatever promise everyware may extend to us, it will be quite some time indeed until we all get to share its benisons on anything like an equal footing.

Thesis 57

Appropriate design documents and conventions do not yet exist.

One unexpected factor that that may inhibit the development of everyware for some time to come is that, while the necessary technical underpinnings may exist, a robust design practice devoted to the field does not. As designers, we haven't even begun to agree on the conventions we'll use to describe the systems we intend to build.

Consider what is involved in an analogous process of development, the design of a large-scale Web site. The success of the whole effort hinges on the accurate communication of ideas among members of the development team. The person who actually has to code the site is joined by the visual designer, who is responsible for the graphic look and feel; the information architect, responsible for the structure and navigation; and perhaps a content strategist, who ensures that written copy and "navitorial" convey a consistent "tone and voice." When sites are developed by agencies operating on behalf of institutional clients, invariably there will also be input from a client-facing account manager as well as representatives of the client's own marketing or corporate communications department.

The documents that are used to coordinate the process among all the parties involved are referred to as "deliverables." A reasonably comprehensive set of deliverables for a Web site might include visual comps, which depict the graphic design direction; a site map, which establishes the overall structure of the site as well as specifying the navigational relationship of a given page to the others; schematics, which specify the navigational options and content available on a given page; and task flows and use cases, which