Down with the Empire: Review of ‘Ubicomp’s Colonial Impulse’

Much like its name implies, the current scope of Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp) is all about going universal, or so suggests Dourish and Mainwaring’s Ubicomp Colonial Impulse paper. The authors argue that the current approach of ubiquitous computing is similar to a colonial imperial one, attempting to universalize knowledge and technology under the assumption that what works somewhere could theoretically work everywhere.

Illustrating similarities with the colonial enterprise, the empire of Ubicomp has a central/peripheral structure where the research lab is the center of power, much like a colonial hub, and the rest of the world is peripheral colonies. The mentality behind this structure seems to arise from the “logic of lack” [1], considering the research lab as a miniature of the world but with the technology and capacity that the rest of the world lacks. Another similarity is the colonial view of the centre being a model that the developing colonies aspire to, and are destined to eventually reach, which is analogous to a perception of the lab as a model of what the world will (or should) be in the future.

Consequently, Ubicomp exhibits many of the same tropes that arise in a colonial empire, with similar drawbacks and advantages. The most important of these is, perhaps, the tendency towards universalization. Working from a major centre, and believing as it does in the development\model centre rhetoric, the colonial empire aims to create universal representations of knowledge that abstract local characteristics and differences into a single model, eventually going for the most universal framework by quantifying knowledge into numbers.

Looking at these colonial tendencies, one can see three aspects of the problem: An ethical aspect that elevates the narrow perspective of the research lab to a position of central power and erases differences, a pragmatic aspect where the fact of the partiality of the perspective is ignored instead of being recognized, and a conceptual aspect that celebrates and focuses on innovation while ignoring the concepts and contributions of previous innovations. To overcome the problem, authors list several strategies including:

• Avoiding the center/peripheral approach to Ubicomp and embracing a more participatory process
• Avoiding the “user” and “non-user” terms (since they imply that everyone will use the designed technology at some point)
• Accounting for the historical and local context when designing
• Accommodating for the differences and diversity of systems so that they can co-exist and coordinate without resolving to universalize them.

Initially, the reader might anticipate a display of associative criticism, where, with the similarities established, a long time might be spent condemning the horrors of colonialism with the implication that these characteristics are just as bad in Ubicomp, but I found that the implications for Ubicomp were indeed demonstrated convincingly.

One could say, essentially, that this is an especially good argument (by contradiction) for Participatory Design, a purpose it fulfills admirably, but it goes well beyond that. This is a provoking call inviting a reimagining of our vision for technological research.

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The case study I picked for this week is The french kitchen: task-based learning in an instrumented kitchen. The kitchen uses Task-Based Learning technologies to support language learning, emphasising the language’s use in practice. The learners are involved in cooking activities in an instrumented kitchen, being guided by the an automated system step-by-step, as a way to learn French for English language speakers [3]. While this approach still borders the colonial enterprise, it is a good example of a universal way of addressing locality.

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Literature:

[1] Dourish, P. and Mainwaring, S.D., 2012, September. Ubicomp’s colonial impulse. In Proceedings of the 2012 ACM Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (pp. 133-142). ACM, http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2370238

[2] Irani, L., Vertesi, J., Dourish, P., Philip, K. and Grinter, R.E., 2010, April. Postcolonial computing: a lens on design and development. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1311-1320). ACM, http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1753522

[3] Hooper, C.J., Preston, A., Balaam, M., Seedhouse, P., Jackson, D., Pham, C., Ladha, C., Ladha, K., Plötz, T. and Olivier, P., 2012, September. The french kitchen: task-based learning in an instrumented kitchen. In Proceedings of the 2012 ACM Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (pp. 193-202). ACM, https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2370246