The following is an edited excerpt from my PhD thesis, which articulates the various ways we might understand what we mean by ‘ubiquitous computing’
‘The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it’ (Weiser, 1991).
‘The goal is to achieve the most effective kind of technology, that which is essentially invisible to the user… I call this future world “Ubiquitous Computing” (Ubicomp) ‘ (Weiser, 1993).
In the last 20 years the idea of ubiquitous computing has been reiterated, revised and extraordinarily expanded. Starting from the premise that computing might be un-tethered from the grey boxes that sit on desks and become ‘embedded in the woodwork’ of everyday life, ‘ubicomp’ has come to signify research agendas, an eponymous conference, technical goals, an ethos and a legacy. This thesis focuses upon the future orientation inherent to all of the threads that weave together to form ubicomp. From the outset the details of ubicomp have been positioned in the future. Weiser’s ‘Computer for the 21st Century’ popularised a research agenda in the guise of a vision that many subsequently adopted. Yet the article was doubly influential because, as Bell and Dourish observe, ‘it also set a rhetorical tone that many have adopted’. Therefore the same concern for near futures is present in contemporary ubicomp agendas, the papers presented in conferences, and the ways in which ‘advances’ in the field are measured.
There are a number of common threads to the various applications of ‘ubicomp’ as a descriptor for research activity. These themes all somewhat branch from the first and most obvious implication of calling it ‘ubiquitous’. It is worth situating the concept in its initial time-space, for when Weiser and his colleagues were experimentally developing the projects that came to make up the ubicomp project there were few affordable personal computers, no ‘World Wide Web’ and mobile telephones could barely fit into a handbag let alone a pocket. The initial experimental systems created as ‘ubi-comp’ at Xerox PARC under Weiser’s leadership were fixed at three scales of device, called ‘tabs’, ‘pads’ and ‘boards’. As Dourish observes, ubicomp proceeded on three tracks, which ‘were known as computation by the inch, the foot and the yard’ (Dourish, 2004), referring to the three types of device. Inch-scale ‘tabs’ were something akin to ‘computationally enhanced Post-It Notes’, foot-scale ‘pads’ were designed as what might now be recognised as ‘tablet PCs’, and yard-scale boards were epitomised by ‘LiveBoard’: ‘a large-scale display… supporting multiple pens, a sort of computationally enhanced whiteboard’. Of course these things were not supposed to exist in isolation, tabs, pads and boards were supposed to be prolific in number and scattered throughout the everyday environment:
‘In the everyday environment, information continually undergoes transformations and translations, and we should expect the same in a computationally enhanced version of that environment such as might be delivered to us by ubiquitous computing’ (Dourish, 2004).
