Moving on from Weiser’s Vision of Calm Computing: Engaging UbiComp Experiences

This week’s paper ‘does what it says on the tin’. The tin in this case being the title. Author Yvonne Rogers’ approach to ‘Moving on from Weiser’s Vision of Calm Computing: Engaging UbiComp Experiences’ is to first explain who Mark Weiser was, and then present his ‘vision’. It turns out that he was the forefather of the ubiquitous computing movement. His central idea was that technology should quietly assist people, being unobtrusive and only making it’s presence felt when it could be of use to someone. As an example the author paints a picture of a person passing a shop and being prompted to buy milk as the system embedded within the fridge has sensed that milk has run low.

Rogers criticism of Weiser’s calm computing vision comes in two parts: Firstly she draws our attention to the quote “we simply don’t do ‘smart’ very well yet”; and goes on to explain how the UbiComp community cannot attain the vision articulated by Weiser until problems within the artificial intelligence field are solved. She sees progress as being prohibitively slow here. Secondly she criticises the underpinning ideas, raising ethical concerns regarding the possibility that data may be misused – data that must be collected by a calm computing system whilst monitoring a person in order to see if they need assistance. Even more fundamentally she poses the possibility of harm being done to people’s ability to learn, remember and think, if they overuse computer technologies to assist them in these areas. Given these computational and ethical problems Rogers’ argues that it is better for ubicomp researchers to change tack and leave their calm computing aspirations behind for now.

She then presents her alternative vision for the direction the UbiComp community should be moving in, and it is this section that satisfies the second half of the paper’s title. She believes that the community should work towards facilitating engaging experiences; using computers to excite people and challenge their thinking and in doing so extend people’s abilities to learn, solve problems and generate ideas. So with this vision people would be encouraged to think, as opposed to being allowed to think less.

I agree with the main thrust of the author’s argument because I can see a lot of use for UbiComp systems outside of the relatively narrow view that is calm computing. Reflecting on a recent reading of Carl DiSalvo’s paper ‘Design, Democracy and Agonistic Pluralism’ I think ubiquitous computing systems could play a role in ‘creating and enabling spaces of contest’ which DiSalvo argues are necessary for democracies to flourish. At this stage I don’t know quite how this would work but I do believe that the application of ubiquitous computing systems to encourage people to engage with the political, is an area we Digital Civics researchers should consider exploring.

I enjoyed reading this paper on a much broader level too. As someone just getting to grips with the various fields that make up computer science it is really interesting to hear reports of the various states of health of each constituent discipline. In this paper the author presents UbiComp as having hit something of a brick wall progress wise. This strikes me as contrasting with the related field of HCI which I understand is burgeoning and has it’s own problems due to the rapid nature of its expansion. At least this is the impression I got after reading Stuart Reeves paper ‘Human-computer interaction as science’.

After this weeks reading I was keen to understand more about the intersection between UbiComp and HCI so I have started reading Geert De Haan’s ‘A Vision of the Future of Media Technology Design Education – design and education from HCI to UbiComp’.