Abowd, G. (2012) What next, Ubicomp? Celebrating an intellectual disappearing act

In ‘What Next, Ubicomp?’  Abowd argues that the study of ubiquitous computing – Ubicomp – faces an identity crisis. Put simply ‘ubiquitous computing is now indistinguishable from computing itself’ and increasingly, work from other intellectual communities is relevant to ubiquitous computing. Rather than framing this as a problem the author suggests we should celebrate the disappearance of Ubicomp as evidence of its success. Drawing heavily on the work of Weiser he argues that ‘the most profound research topics are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday research until they are indistinguishable from it’.

Abowd describes a continuum in the balance between technology development and application which is analogous to the debates around pure versus applied social science. At one end of the continuum is the application agnostic research where the results will be relevant across many different application domains. At the other end of the scale is applications driven research where technology makes such a research contribution to an issue that it ceases to be identified as a ‘Ubicomp’ piece of research and becomes subsumed into the issue’s domain. An example of this would be when health-related apps become part of the realm of health research and therefore reported in medical journals with little or no mention of the Ubicomp community from which they initiated. Between these two extremes sits applications motivated research where researchers balance technological intervention with the needs of a particular problem domain and iterate between the two perspectives.

Using the history of personal computing the author proposes that in order to move forward ubiquitous computing tools must be ‘opened up’ beyond the hands of software engineers and the tech-savvy. Abowd argues that the first generation of computing was when one computer was provided to many individuals. In the second there was one computer per individual. The third generation has seen the proliferation of devices so that effectively individuals have many computers. His prediction for the future is a fourth generation where the line between the computing device and the individual is blurred and the ‘human-computer experience’ is increasingly conjoined.

The reference to ‘cyborgs’ and our sense of who we are physically changing with the introduction of new technologies/applications fits well with my understanding of developments in digital sociology and the sociology of the body. As Lupton remarks “When digital technologies operate as we expect them to, they feel as if they are inextricably part of our bodies and selves” [1]. However, when such technologies break down or fail then their meanings, which we might have otherwise taken for granted, become open for examination. I have chosen one of the papers [2] referenced by Abowd as an example of application motivated research in the health sphere because I think health applications bring the fascinating issues around embodiment and technology most clearly to the fore. I also found it interesting, in the context of ‘seams in the cyborg’, that Consolvo et al describe how traditional error metrics did not adequately capture how users perceived errors in the system. Finally, I was amused by the reference to user-manipulation of the data in systems that use on-body sensing having recently read about the ‘Un-fitbits’ project [3].

[1] Lupton, D. (2015) Digital Sociology

[2] Consolvo et al (2008) Activity sensing in the wild: a field trial of ubifit garden http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1357335

[3] http://www.unfitbits.com/