The development of Ubicomp – HCI for Digital Civics 2015

Our previous readings that looked at researching practices and new frameworks for participatory design were all responses to changes being made in the field of HCI [1,2] . They have all attributed this change to expanding multidisciplinary nature of the field. In response to this expansion in the field of ubiquitous computing (ubicomp), the field that explores the integration of digital technology in every day objects, Liu et al’s paper aims at documenting this expansion and reflecting on the current nature of the field. The paper aims to answer the questions of whether the collaboration of multi-disciplinarians has fragmented the field of ubiquitous computing.

Some critics within the field are claiming that many of the publications being made in publication venues dedicated to ubicomp can easily be published in other venues that are not strictly ubicomp related. Just out of curiosity I put in the key words “ubiquitous computing” in PubMed (a database dedicated to health publications) and got 303 results. Quickly skimming through them I saw that many of the search results were relevant to the field of ubicomp. This simple search highlighted the relevance of this paper’s aims.

The methodology used by the authors is an interesting one that allows the dissection of the field on several levels. The use of co-word analysis allows for the (1) linking of keywords that describe the studies being investigated, (2) the evaluation of the strength of the links, (3) mapping of the interactions of themes wither each other, and (4) the identification of the core and periphery themes. The methodology resulted in visually appealing diagrams that simplify the complexities of an expanding field. It also allows researchers in multiple disciplines easily pinpoint where their area of research falls in relation to others and the progression of the field.

The results showed that over time the field has naturally expanded towards new topics however there is a rift in research themes between the periods of 1999-2007 and 2008-2013. The authors highlighted the presence of this paradigm shift however failed to explain the causes of this shift. One expert in the field Dr. Alberecht Schmidt, a professor at the HCI lab in the University of Stuttgart, theorized in his keynote speech at AMI2011 that this shift can be attributed to changes in communication habits, an increase in media capture and the changes in the perceptions of people as they are being exposed to more information [3]. One can relate the increase in popularity of the keywords “social network” and “location based” to the aforementioned causes however until a study establishes these causation links it is just speculation that this paper has failed to address.

The study found that the field of ubicomp has become more cohesive as themes are still closely linked (core to periphery) and the links were identified to be strong links. Unsurprisingly, “mobile devices” was the most popular key word followed by “sensing” and “applications”. These key words were classified as the mainstream themes between 2008 and 2013. Keywords such as “health” that represent new fields that are exploring the use of mobile devices, sensors and applications were found to be on the rise. Similarly, so are the keywords “hci” and “citizen”. This documents the potential shift away from systems to citizen led models, which is exciting as we as digital civics students/researchers are in the midst (if not part of the catalysts) of the rise of these new themes.

The authors did achieve their aims in showing the ubicomp is evolving rather than fragmenting. However, the paper has other implications. The paper in itself may influence the evolution of ubicomp as researchers and funders will look at their mapping of emerging themes to direct their research with aims to get more grants and publish more.

For this week I have selected the paper titled “Telehealth and ubiquitous computing for bandwidth-constrained rural and remote areas” (full reference below) as it looks at ubiquitous computing for health, one of the emerging fields highlighted by our reading, in low resource areas.

Steele, R., & Lo, A. (2013). Telehealth and ubiquitous computing for bandwidth-constrained rural and remote areas. Personal and ubiquitous computing, 17(3), 533-543. DOI: 10.1007/s00779-012-0506-5

References:

1. Kuutti, K., & Bannon, L. J. (2014, April). The turn to practice in HCI: Towards a research agenda. In Proceedings of the 32nd annual ACM conference on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 3543-3552). ACM.

2. Björgvinsson, E., Ehn, P., & Hillgren, P. A. (2010, November). Participatory design and democratizing innovation. In Proceedings of the 11th Biennial Participatory Design Conference (pp. 41-50). ACM.

3. Schmidt, A. (2011, November 18). Closing Keynote at AMI2011, Beyond Ubicomp – Computing is Changing the Way we Live. Retrieved October 26, 2015, from hciLab: http://www.hcilab.org/2011/11/closing-keynote-at-ami2011-beyond-ubicomp-computing-is-changing-the-way-we-live-2/

Jan Kučera says:

October 27, 2015 at 4:51 am

It’s great that you did some further research on the topic and good point that this paper does not try discuss why the discovered changes happened, although I am not sure that was their aim.

You mentioned that “mobile devices” are leading the chart unsurprisingly. Why is that not surprising? Were there first mobile devices or papers about using them?

Reem Refaat Talhouk says:

October 27, 2015 at 9:10 am

I thought about the whole chicken and the egg dilemma. Was it the spontaneous use of mobile phones in different ways by people that triggered research in this field or was it research in the field that pushed forward the many ways we currently use our phones. Maybe it is both.

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Matt Wood says:

October 29, 2015 at 5:37 pm

You pick up on some really nice ideas in your blogpost. Indeed, the idea that ubicomp research has become so diverse that the idea of venues for publication has become complicated is a challenging one, although I do wonder whether it’s just a kick up the backside for people in academia to start diversifying the places they look for literature, particularly when writing about technology. As an example, sitting between psychology and HCI, health psychologists are very often making technology tools with little or no engagement with the HCI literature that repeatedly frustrates me!

It’s worth saying that I was left a bit unconvinced by the overall claims of the paper that “empirical” research is needed to examine the identity of ubicomp. In fact I thought their “empirical” research was full of assumptions that weren’t very well articulated (i.e. why did they ignore the author keywords just because they were inconsistent? Why did they just look at abstracts? Surely just looking at abstracts is going to lead to a prominence in certain words?) For me a finding that the words “social network” and “location based” are more common in recent years isn’t particularly surprising or interesting, and is just a reflection of technology we have available to us. Personally I wouldn’t be all that concerned with finding a causal link to the use of these words and phrases (and surely this would be near on impossible to do?), rather how their articles frame and represent the world of ubicomp. I agree, that the rise of references to terms such as citizens and health is relevant to those of us working in digital civics, but I think probably most of us already made this assumption, and I do wonder how grand a conclusion we can make about the identity of ubicomp from a somewhat (perhaps necessarily) limited methodology.

Reem Refaat Talhouk says:

October 30, 2015 at 11:25 am

Regarding the diverse venues for publications on technology it is kind of a double edge sword. On one hand it has allowed for a wider variety of publications to come (for example now public health journals are having special editions that are dedicated to technology in public health); on the other hand it has made it quite difficult to have a comprehensive overview of the field of ubicomp.

I disagree I enjoyed the empirical work that they have done, it attempts to map out a field of study that is quite wide. I do acknowledge that it is based on some faulty assumptions but after conducting a systematic review myself I realised that some assumptions should be made for practical reasons or else you would have a study scope that is impossible to deal with. Also this study would come in really handy when trying to conduct a search on ubicomp and other fields as it identifies keywords that are associated with ubicomp.

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