Dan’s review of week 3 paper: “Yesterday’s Tomorrows: Notes on ubiquitous computing’s dominant vision”

In this paper, Bell and Dourish discuss the direction that ubicomp had been taking since the field’s inception. The authors point out that ubicomp has been heavily guided by Weiser’s seminal paper “The Computer for the twenty-first Century” – a paper published in 1991 which envisioned a future where users wouldn’t interface with “dramatic computers”, instead interacting with devices which were ‘invisible’ and ubiquitous in their lives. The idea that Weiser’s paper would still be hugely influential decades later is certainly an odd one, considering the amount of technological advancement that has occurred in the meantime. Bell and Dourish argue that the fact that Weiser’s future is still mostly referred to in the “proximate future” tense – always on the near horizon, never quite there yet – suggests one of two things: either ubiquitous computing can never come to pass, or that it already has done.

They argue that ubiquitous computing had already arrived at their time of writing (2005), just potentially not in the exact form that Weiser had predicted – they use widespread use of mobile technologies in Korea and Singapore as examples of existing ubiquitous technology. The authors claim that it might not have been recognised as ubicomp because the inherent messiness of infrastructures make the technology seem less than ubiquitous. Weiser’s future technology was meant to be clean and orderly, so people didn’t recognise the highly visible but messy technologies of 2005 as being ubiquitous computing.

The obvious counterpoint to Bell and Dourish’s two explanations for why ubiquitous computing ‘hadn’t come to pass’ (that is, either that it could never happen or that it already had happened) is that it could still happen, but the world wasn’t ready for it – be that either socially or technologically. The reason for the authors’ peers continuing to look towards Weiser’s “proximate” future could simply be that it would actually happen, but wasn’t there yet.

It is also interesting to read this paper from the perspective of a citizen of 2015, with an additional decade of technological advances. Today, it could certainly be argued that ubiquitous computing is, in fact, a reality – the adoption of wearable computing (such as Fitbit, Apple Watch and Android Wear) and low-cost, borderline disposable technology (see e-readers such as the Kindle) into the mainstream’s technological lexicon would certainly support the idea that technology has been woven into people’s everyday lives in a manner not too dissimilar to Weiser’s predictions. In many ways the technology that the authors mention seem quaint – the Korean feng shui and weather mobile services which were noteworthy in 2005 pale in comparison to today’s plethora of mobile applications. However, it is easy to see the links between the two. Perhaps the authors’ use of Gibson’s quote “The future is already here; it’s just not very evenly distributed” was apt – the technology has just been distributed much further than it had been a decade ago and is now just more recognisable as being ‘traditional’ ubiquitous computing.

The paper I will be analysing this week is “Activity sensing in the wild: a field trial of ubifit garden” (DOI: 10.1145/1357054.1357335).