“A great and troubling beauty”: cognitive speculation and ubiquitous computing

Abstract

For more than two decades, ubiquitous computing research has remained very much in the shadow of Mark Weiser’s seminal vision, first sketched out in ‘‘The Computer for the 21st Century’’ [44]. In this essay, Weiser proposes a new paradigm of computing, ubicomp, which he claims would replace the PC as the dominant form of human–computer interaction. The essay goes far beyond proposing new interaction paradigms, however; Weiser compares ubicomp in cultural import to the emergence of literacy, proposes radical and far-reaching reconfigurations in human–computer interaction, and introduces new conceptual vocabulary, offering a holistic vision for this new field. Along the way, the essay delves into philosophy, mentioning Heidegger and Gadamer alongside Herb Simon, John Seely Brown, and James Gibson, while claiming ‘‘we are trying to conceive a new way of thinking about computers in the world.’’ This ‘‘new way of thinking’’ suggests much more than even a very ambitious engineering project; it is a philosophical project. It rejects reductive conceptualizations of the field—dismissing, for example, the notion that ubicomp means little more than computers at the beach— and proposes instead a more or less new physical world, one which would throw all of us into a new mode of human experience, which he calls ‘‘embodied virtuality.’’ At the same time, Weiser’s essay also promises technologies that will disappear and ‘‘weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life.’’ It fleshes out this promise by exploring a number of speculations about the technologies, such as ever-shrinking and every cheaper processor that would power the tab-, pad-, and board-sized computational objects that would enable this weaving. Five years later, Weiser and colleague John Seely Brown [45] updated this vision in an essay called ‘‘The Coming Age of Calm Technology,’’ which contains many of the same rhetorical and historicizing strategies found in the first essay, and in which the two PARC authors develop the speculative dimension of the ubicomp vision by imagining the implications of people having to interact with hundreds of computers that surround them at any given time. Once again comparing the advent of ubiquitous computing to the advent of writing (and this time also adding the rise of electricity), the authors forecast a radically altered future. As before, they envision much more than technological change; they talk about the changing nature of human relationships, ‘‘reopening old assumptions,’’ and transformations in theory itself: ‘‘Research from radios to user interfaces, from hardware to theory, are impacted by the changed context of ubiquity’’ [45, p. 7]. Based on this forecasting, they propose a whole new model of human– computer interaction, which they dub ‘‘calm technology.’’ The idea is that with hundreds of processors per person (or, as they project at one point, one thousand devices for every atom on the earth’s surface), technology cannot be the center of our attention the way it is today, or it will overwhelm us. Instead, they argue that it should enter and exit our attention gracefully, moving from periphery to the center of attention as needed. Calm technologies will alter human perception itself, by extending our peripheral reach. Weiser and Brown’s paper can be seen as an update to Weiser’s original vision by maintaining its visionary characteristics: its bold technological predictions, J. Bardzell (&) ! S. Bardzell School of Informatics and Computing, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA e-mail: jbardzel@indiana.edu