Everyware_ The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing - Adam Greenfield [8]
The 802.11b standard we know as Wi-Fi, of course, didn't yet exist. you couldn't simply cobble together a project around off-the-shelf wireless routers. The in-building wireless network prototypes like Active Badge depended on were bespoke, one-off affairs; in more than one project, students simply sketched in connectivity as a black box, an assertion that if an actual network were somehow to come into existence, then the proposed system would function like so.
In such an environment, it may have been reasonable to posit a pervasive wireless network in the workplace. However, a deployment in public space or the domestic sphere was clearly out of the question.
The mass uptake of the Internet changed everything. What would have seemed fanciful from the perspective of 1992 became far more credible in its wake. As a lingua franca, as an enabling technology, and especially as an available kit of parts, the dramatic, global spread of Internet Protocol-based networking immediately made schemes of ubiquity feasible.
Over the next several years, a profusion of projects explored various strategies for living with, and not merely using, information technology. Some of the proposals and products we'll be encountering in this book include keys and wallets that locate themselves when misplaced; a beer mat that summons the bartender when an empty mug is placed upon it; and a bathtub that sounds a tone in another room when the desired water temperature has been reached. *
* Could the mental models attached to such familiar forms unduly limit what people think of to do with them? The answer is almost certainly yes; we'll take up that question a bit later on.
Some of the most beautiful everyware I've seen was designed by former PARC researcher Ranjit Makkuni, whose New Delhi-based Sacred World Foundation works to bridge the gap between technological and traditional cultures. This is information processing interwoven with the familiar daily forms not of the developed world, but of the global South, cycle rickshaws, clay pots, and amulets among them. It's a lovely reminder that the world contains a great many different "everydays," beyond the ones we happen to be used to.
Whether clay pot or beer mat, though, these projects all capitalize on the idea that the distinctly local application of intelligence, and not the generic, one-size-fits-all vision embodied in computers, will turn out to be among the most important and useful legacies of our technological moment. In this, they appear to be following the advice of human interface pioneer Don Norman.
Norman argues, in The Invisible Computer and elsewhere, that the difficulty and frustration we experience in using the computer are primarily artifacts of its general-purpose nature. He proposes that a truly human-centered design would explode the computer's many functions into a "quiet, invisible, unobtrusive" array of networked objects scattered throughout the home: simple, single-purpose "information appliances" in the form of shoes, bookshelves, even teddy bears.
Or we could go still deeper "into the woodwork." Stefano Marzano points out, in his introduction to Philips Electronics' 2000 exploration of wearable electronics, New Nomads, that when we remove the most transient layer of things from the environments we spend our lives in, we're left with nothing but the spaces themselves, abstracted down to their essentials. These are universals humans have lived in for millennia, elements like walls and roofs, tables and seating, clothing. And, of course, the body itself—our original and our final home. In everyware, all of these present appealing platforms for networked computation.
Fifteen years downstream from its tentative beginnings at Olivetti, the idea of the ordinary as a new frontier for computing is finally starting to bear fruit. We're beginning to see the walls and books, sweaters, and tabletops around us reconsidered as sensors, interface objects, or active sites that respond in some way to data they receive from outside. Eventually, we may even come to see them as