Introducing pervasive computing to society

Abstract

Pervasive computing is a relatively new area of interest within computer science. Most challenges that have been faced so far in our attempts at designing pervasive systems have been technical, as the focus of much of the research has been on implementation aspects, such as the enabling technologies and techniques for combining and integrating various technologies in a system [Hightower & Borriello, 2001]. Although such issues are of crucial importance, they do not address a vitally important issue of truly pervasive computing: integration and interaction with society. We argue that this is in large part due to the physical and conceptual limitations of current attempts at implementing pervasive systems. Pervasive computing was supposed to be part of our everyday life and promised to assist us in all our activities regardless of our location [Weiser, 1991]. This vision of pervasive computing is that, ultimately, our whole society will benefit from such systems, and not just a few people doing very constrained tasks within physical “islands” of computing support. A pervasive system cannot reach its full potential – and cannot really be described as pervasive – when it is limited to, say, a “smart house” or a “smart car”. If the whole of society is to benefit from such systems, then the whole of society must be part of such a system. Thus, the social issues that arise are not just side effects or problems that can be dealt with ad hoc, but are at the heart of the challenge – and the solution. Much research to date in pervasive computing systems has focused primarily on small-scale, geographically constrained systems and the technical challenges that they entail. We argue that for the vision of truly pervasive systems to be realised, we must develop better understandings of and design methodologies for large-scale pervasive systems and the societal challenges that they will entail. Rather than moving towards large-scale pervasive systems in a bottom-up way from today’s small-scale systems, and their associated challenges and ad hoc solutions, we argue for following a topdown approach, drawing on the human-computer interaction (HCI) lessons that have already been learned in the development of more traditional computer systems. In our work, we revisit and extend the established HCI design foci of user, task and domain so that they are more relevant to designing for a social setting, proposing three analogous foci of citizen, sphere, and space respectively. The concept of a citizen can be more meaningful than the concept of a user in the social realm. Arguably, we may know little or nothing about the users of a publicly available, largescale pervasive system, but there are a number of things we can know about citizens in general. Such information includes citizenship rights, how citizens view public systems (e.g. TV, public transport etc), what sort of legislation regulates the design and implementation of such systems, and what type of access to public systems users prefer or require.