Antisedentary Beigeless Computing

Abstract

Four decades of sporadic invention and experimentation of and with non-traditional human-computer interface schemes have congealed (somewhat abruptly though not without a few clear-sighted antecedents) into a new field of information system design, here calledAntisedentary Beigeless Computing, that consciously rejects the traditional conception of isolated tete-a-tete between the human and the box-CRT-keyboardmouse. ABC systems instead favour the complementary directions away from this notion of an immobile info-shrine: more personal, intimate, and portable information access; and more diffuse, environmentally-integrated information access. Consideration of ABC projects to date seems to suggest that no single instance can alone express the full generality required of a ‘working’ information system, so that (on the one hand) system design must acknowledge that a complex set of trade-offs involving capabilities, universality, specificity, personalization, and generality is inescapable; while (on the other hand) an ideal, eventual ‘information environment’ will inevitably comprise the careful interweaving of some number of individual ABC systems. Taxonomies and classification schema can rarely hope to be found complete or flawless before the collection of items that they purport to describe have themselves reached the evolutionary stasis of ‘adulthood’ — that is, there is typically some threshold of development or growth beyond which few enough surprises lurk that an encompassing taxonomy can be constructed and observed to reliably encompass, in the longer term. The domain of ABC thought is still quite nascent, and so we would be foolish to assume that all its extremities of form and connotation are now visible, but to the extent that we can already see the outlines of a ‘field’ it is reasonable to make a first run at an analytic taxonomy. The ‘independent character axes’ approach presented here seems broad and loose enough to accommodate any number of additions to the basic stable of ABC systems. It is, further, a taxonomy amenable to significant revision as may be found necessary: axes can be added, deleted, reconstrued, etc. as time and consideration clarify our understanding of ABC. However, it should also be anticipated that the field will eventually coalesce around a much smaller number of better-defined ‘axes’ and thus permit taxonomic reversion to the more hierarchical (and finally more satisfying) ‘Linnean’ scheme we'd originally imagined establishing.