Everyware_ The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing - Adam Greenfield [91]
There have been attempts to return this perspective to written discussions of ubiquitous systems, some more successful than others. Thinkers as varied as the sociologist and anthropologist Anne Galloway, the industrial design provocateurs Dunne & Raby, and symposiarch John Thackara of the Doors of Perception conferences have all considered the question of pervasive computing from a critical perspective. I read Paul Dourish's Where the Action Is, particularly, as a passionate call to strip away the layers and layers of abstraction that so often prevent computing from benefiting the people it is intended to serve, people whose choices are both limited and given meaning by their being-in-the-world. But even this most literate of ubicomp writings is not enough—or is, at least, insufficiently explicit to help the working designer.
And that really is the issue: The working designer may not have the inclination, and definitely does not have the time, to trawl Heidegger for insight into the system they are bringing into being. Anybody working under the pressures and constraints of contemporary technology-development practice will need relatively clear-cut principles to abide by and to wield in discussions with the other members of their team.
Moreover, such guidelines would be of clear utility to those procuring and using everyware. If there is a compact, straightforward, and widely agreed-upon set of guidelines, then a given system's compliance with them could be verified and certified for all to see by something analogous to an interoperability mark. We could trust, in encountering such a system, that every practical measure had been taken to secure the maintenance or extension of our prerogatives.
This is just what all of our explorations have been building toward. After considering its definition, its origins, its likely implications, and the timing of its arrival, we are now ready to articulate five principles for the ethical development of everyware, even as we acknowledge that any such set of principles is bound to be contingent, provisional, and incomplete at best.
One final note: While these principles do aim to provide both developers and users with a useful degree of clarity, they do not spell solutions out in detail. Given the early stage of everyware's evolution, and especially everything we've learned about the futility of evaluating a system when it's been decontextualized and stripped of its specific referents to the real world, the principles focus not on how to achieve a given set of ends, but on what ends we should be pursuing in the first place.
Thesis 73
Everyware must default to harmlessness.
The first of our principles concerns what happens when ubiquitous systems fail. What happens when a critical percentage of sensors short out, when the building's active lateral bracing breaks down, when weather conditions disrupt the tenuous wireless connection? Or what if there's a blackout?
"Graceful degradation" is a term used in engineering to express the ideal that if a system fails, if at all possible it should fail gently in preference to catastrophically; functionality should be lost progressively, not all at once. A Web browser might be unable to apply the proper style sheet to a site's text, but it will still serve you with the unstyled text, instead of leaving you gazing at a blank screen; if your car's ABS module goes out, you lose its assistance in autopumping the brakes ten times a second, but you can still press down on the brake pedal in order to slow the car.
Graceful degradation is nice, but it doesn't go nearly far enough for our purposes. Given the assumption of responsibility inherent in everyware, we must go a good deal further. Ubiquitous systems must default to a mode that ensures users' physical, psychic, and financial safety.
Note that this is not an injunction to keep subjects safe