Author: sam

Sam is owner of this blog and works as a senior lecturer in digital geographies.
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Remembering the future: PARC 1987 & Microsoft 2006

I was checking out the very engaging ‘Milestones‘ timeline on the PARC website and came across an image that evoked a sense of deja vu. The other place I had seen something very similar was in a Microsoft ‘Future Vision of Manufacturing‘ video. Here are the images:

Xerox PARC CoLab circa 1987

 

Microsoft Future Vision of Manufacturing collaborative screen circa 2006

The first image depicts the Xerox PARC ‘CoLab‘ collaborative workspace and tools research conducted in the late 1980s. Two people are working on the same sketch from different sides of the screen, which are actually located in different places. The second comes from the aforementioned Microsoft video. Two business men on different sides of the world discuss a wireframe of a proposed car seat, to be manufactured. Interestingly the Microsoft video came about 20 years after the PARC project documented in the first image.

Technology futures are not always novel, what is envisaged can have a significant heritage. Yesterday’s tomorrows can easily become today’s tomorrows with some deft recycling. As Picasso said: ‘good artists copy…’

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Addressing ubicomp: Computing people, places and things

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).

Continue reading “Addressing ubicomp: Computing people, places and things”

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Ubiquitous Computing: Mark Weiser’s vision and legacy

This is a sub-section of the first chapter of my PhD thesis, its my attempt to reflect on Mark Weiser’s legacy in the field of ubiquitous computing.

2009 marked the tenth anniversary of the death of Mark Weiser, a man that many believe earned the title ‘visionary’. As a Principal Scientist and subsequently Chief Technology Officer at Xerox PARC, Weiser has been identified as the ‘godfather’ of ubiquitous computing (ubicomp). In the years since his demise many of the ideas that Weiser championed have come to greater prominence. As Yvonne Rogers points out this influence has been felt across industry, government and commercial research, from the European Union’s ‘disappearing computer’ initiative to MIT’s ‘Oxygen’, HP’s ‘CoolTown’ and Philips ‘Vision of the Future’. All of these projects aspired to Weiser’s tenet of the everyday environment and the objects within being embedded with computational capacities such that they might bend to our (human) will. Within the research community, as Genevieve Bell and Paul Dourish remark ‘almost one quarter of all the papers published in the ‘Ubicomp’ conference between 2001 and 2005 cite Weiser’s foundational articles’.

Continue reading “Ubiquitous Computing: Mark Weiser’s vision and legacy”

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links for 2010-03-11

  • You Look Ridiculous: The Other Augmented Reality Issue
    AR presents interesting user experience design issues [for through the viewfinder type AR] that involve navigating expected norms of behaviour in public. What the critical comments in this article illustrate is that AR is not a one-size-fits-all technical solution. Perhaps it needs to be folded back into the broader suite of ubicomp and pervasive media ideas about technological mediation and context aware equipment [in the Heideggerian sense, hah!]. Layar also probably needs to be thought of as an experiment that will lead to other things, much in the way we no longer have pagers for example.
    (tags: augmentedreality mobile mobilities vision design experience ubicomp socio-technical)
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PhD: “Practising tomorrows? Ubiquitous computing and the politics of anticipation”

On Friday 26th February I submitted my PhD thesis, entitled “Practising tomorrows? Ubiquitous computing and the politics of anticipation“. I am now working as a Research Fellow in Digital Cultures, as part of the newly founded Digital Cultures Research Centre and the University of the West of England. [UPDATE: You can read the whole thesis here.]

Here is the abstract for the thesis:

This thesis describes the ways in which technological futurity is a complex array of performative and proactive dispositions towards the future that are irreducible to normative and deterministic understandings of ‘progress’. It takes ubiquitous computing as a significant case study because the future orientation practised in ubiquitous computing research and development is emblematic of the perpetual technological forecasting in which humanity engages. While ubiquitous computing has existed as an agenda for nearly 20 years it is still largely concerned with a future that has not (yet) been realised. In the context of ubiquitous computing this thesis argues that it is necessary to make the politics of anticipation, as the particular discursive and performative ways in which future-orientation is codified and conditioned, explicit in technology development. This thesis therefore enacts a critical framework that charts a discourse of anticipation, as the multiple means for articulating proactive future orientation, internal to which are anticipatory logics that structure and rationalise how such forms of futurity are practised.

The motivation and ambit of this research is to thereby describe a politics of anticipation as the ways in which the anticipation of technological futures is codified and contested, whilst performative and multiple. Empirically, the argument is made through the discussion of interviews conducted with a range of internationally significant practitioners of ubiquitous computing research and development, which were carried out in Silicon Valley, California, in 2008. Attending to discourse, logics and emergent politics of anticipation provides a means of making explicit how our ‘knowledge’ of technological futures is produced. It is therefore argued that we should attend to socio-technical futurity as inherently situated in the living present, with all of its associated concerns, and allow for the indeterminacy of the future.

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Ironic vision of augmented (hyper)reality

Timo Arnall points out this video, by a masters student(!), that depicts a slightly nightmarish, yet amusingly ironic, vision of a possible future world with augmented reality, whereby you earn money by subjecting yourself to advertising and depend upon instructions from the system for even basic tasks.

The latter half of the 20th century saw the built environment merged with media space, and architecture taking on new roles related to branding, image and consumerism. Augmented reality may recontextualise the functions of consumerism and architecture, and change in the way in which we operate within it.

A film produced for my final year Masters in Architecture, part of a larger project about the social and architectural consequences of new media and augmented reality.

Augmented (hyper)Reality by Keiichi Matsuda

[via Timo Arnall & Berg]

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Social glue, or: What’s the ‘IMAP’ equivalent for social media?

The launch of Google Buzz has prompted me to raise some things that have been lurking in the back of my mind for some time. These thoughts began when the discussion about the ‘walled garden’ nature of facebook et al. emerged a couple of years ago and lead to the initiation of tentative steps towards interconnection and (that horribly overused word) ‘openness’ in the guise of ‘friend connect‘ and ‘facebook connect‘. Twitter was already sort of ahead of the game with their API, as the glut of applications for ‘tweeting’ attests.

Lots of talk on the interweb’s various locations for commentary centred on the social web, real-time web etc. being based in discrete platforms. This remains somewhat true today. We can certainly connect these services together and form extraordinary information gathering tools in the form of what Howard Rheingold usefully describes as ‘personal information dashboards’, using services such as netvibes and pipes in concert with the various APIs for the platforms we all use. However, this all takes quite a bit of effort at the moment [but! for a good tutorial, please check out Howard’s super videos: #1, #2, #3].

However, for the majority of internet users to usefully stick all of these various platforms and applications together there needs to be a much lower threshold of effort to achieve the desired results. Jyri Engstrom, co-founder of Jaiku and one of the big brains apparently behind ‘Buzz’, articulates the argument well here:

Most of the conversation over the last 24h has been centered around predicting if “Buzz will kill” this or that service. This debate starts from the assumption that Buzz and the rest of the social web are mutually exclusive. It’s arguably fair to assume so, considering all the social networks we’ve got so far are silos. To no longer assume everyone has to be using the same branded system to talk to each other is disruptive to the tech biz discourse, which is obsessed with turning everything into a war over which company is “the one”. So much so that the alternative is almost unthinkable. If the new standards succeed, in 2015 we’ll look back and shake our heads like we shake our heads today at the early days of proprietary phone networks and email systems. The thought that you couldn’t call, text or email people just because they happen to be on another phone operator or email client is laughable. Doubly so for the social Web. The reason many of the current commentators miss this point is that they are, in the immortal words of Walt Whitman, “demented with the mania of owning things.” (borrowing that quote from Doc Searls)

What are these ‘new standards’ then? Well, if we’re to take our cue from Google they consist of the development of the various existing data formats for syndication: extensions of Atom and RSS, such as activity streams and mediaRSS. There may well be families and hierarchies of such data formats and I’m sure hundreds, if not thousands, of developers are already working on creating these things. But I’m still left with this question: what if I don’t want my stuff (information, pictures, etc.) always held on servers owned by Google, facebook etc? What if I’m happy for such ‘stuff’ to be transient? Which of course such companies don’t want because your ‘stuff’ is incredibly valuable and they want to mine it for all its worth. Nevertheless, my half-formed thoughts are: what’s the equivalent to IMAP for social media?

To my mind, the missing ‘glue’ for the social networking ecosystem is the missing service architecture to allow all of us to host our own streams and tie together the various bits of our rapidly growing, perhaps increasingly ‘public’, ‘digital identity’. Social media could easily be distributed, just as blogs and ‘web 1.0’ are. What’s to stop a community creating something like wordpress or drupal for activity/social streams? If the standards suggested by Google really are that versatile then all that is necessary is to create a system that imports/exports using them. Search would be renewed in its importance, but companies/services like twitter could remain successful by facilitating that search functionality and helping users subscribe to one another’s feeds/streams.

A couple of years ago I thought about it in terms of a ‘meta-platform’ or ‘platform for platforms’, but we’ve kind of seen these, in the form of friendfeed and their ilk. Now I think, well, it could all still happen over port 80 with web traffic – it just needs an architecture to allow people to stick things up on their own servers and interconnect. If we take what Jyri says (above) seriously, it seems to me the logical step is to really set the social web ‘free’ and build the elements required to allow people to host their own activity streams. Maybe this is already happening. To build on Jyri’s theme of looking to a future and to paraphrase Alan Kay: “the best way to predict the future is to [build] it”. Go to it!!

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links for 2009-11-27