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December 26, 2006

Review of "Everyware: The dawning age of ubiquitous computing" by Adam Greenfield

(First, a disclaimer: I recently criticized Bill Moggridge pretty strongly for writing a book all about his friends, so I’ll admit up front that Everyware’s author Adam Greenfield is a friend of mine, and he thanks me (along with many others) in the book’s acknowledgments. I also read and commented on bits of Everyware before its publication. Adam’s writing period was bounded roughly by two design events (Design Engaged 2004 and 2005) I organized that he attended. Everyware includes a couple of references to people and projects from those events, and Adam presented an early version of the content of the final section of Everyware there as well. In other words, I’ve had a ridiculously long time to prepare this review. Thanks for being patient, Adam.)

Adam’s thesis in Everyware: The dawning age of ubiquitous computing is that technology and our experience of it will change significantly in the very near future: computer processing will insinuate its way in into our daily lives deeply and invisibly, in a way that PCs haven’t. It will move from our desktops and server rooms into our walls, our furniture, our clothing, and perhaps even into our bodies; everyware will literally be everywhere.

There’s a great Mies Van Der Rohe quote from 1938 I kept thinking of while reading Everyware:

Each material has its specific characteristics which we must understand if we want to use it…. And just as we acquaint ourselves with materials, just as we must understand functions, so we must become familiar with the psychological and spiritual factors of our day. No cultural activity is possible otherwise; for we are dependent on the spirit of our time.

Five minutes with Adam’s other writings (or with Adam himself) will convince your he’s a Modernist , deeply concerned with the honest relationship of form to function and with the material nature of the designed environment. Yet familiar ideas about “form” and “function”, not to mention “material”, break down quickly when talking about invisible technologies. Everyware is in large part an attempt to explore what—exactly—this new “material” is, and what are its specific characteristics? More importantly, what will the the actual experience of this near-future technology feel like?

Adam calls everyware “information processing dissolving into behavior”, a riff on Naoto Fukasawa’s line about “design dissolving in behavior”. Fukasawa meant that the best product design is so unobtrusive that you simply stop noticing you’re using it. (For instance, if you wear a watch, you almost certainly glanced at it a few times yesterday. But can you actually remember doing it? Wristwatches are designs that have fully dissolved in behavior.) Adam’s phrase implies something similar, that ubicomp (“ubiquitous computation”) technologies allow complex data processing to fade from conscious use: think Star Trek’s shipboard computers, summoned with the spoken “Computer…”, as opposed to Windows’ clumsy “Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to login.” But Adam’s version of the phrase also evokes something sinister. “Information processing” has the ring of surveillance to it, of your movements in a city’s shopping district monitored by closed circuit cameras, of your credit card purchase histories tracked and archived, or of your web browsing history living forever on Google’s servers. We don’t necessarily want information processing to become as imperceptible to us, nor to fully “dissolve” into everyday behaviors. Everyware is Adam’s considered vision of both the positive and negative outcomes of pervasive, invisible computation.

Everyware is organized into five main sections, phrased as questions: what is everyware? How is it different from what we’re used to? What’s driving its emergence as a technology and design opportunity? What issues should we be aware of? Who gets to determine what everyware is, and how it behaves? When should we prepare for everyware? And finally, how do we “safeguard our prerogatives” and avoid some of the sinister implications of everyware? Each section answers the question in a series of assertions (“theses” here) of a sentence or two each; each thesis is page or three long.

The Make magazine reader will probably enjoy Everyware, though it doesn’t delve into technical details at all; no homebrew everyware projects here. I hope that ubicomp academics find its points about design ethics valuable as well. But Everware is probably going to find its audience mostly among user experience designers, those of us who have a foot in both technology and design (and probably don’t see too much difference between the two fields). Section 2 (“How is everyware different from what we’re used to?”) is largely framed in terms that those of us in the UX community will respond to. And it’s this longest Section that makes Everyware most feel like it was written for me: a designer working in technology, with a fair understanding of things like networks, protocols, and software engineering, but I’m by no means an expert in them. I’m generally aware of developments around ubiquitous computation, RFID, touch-based computing, and the increasingly sophisticated applications of mobile computing, but I haven’t worked on any of them. Everyware strikes a good balance between the impenetrable proceedings of the UBICOMP conferences and design writing. Adam expects the reader to get references to “Ctrl-Zing something away, “elevator pitches”, and “user experience” and something about how people behave with mobile phones. This is fairly critical to the overall success of the book: by positioning everyware in relationship to more familiar types of software (in Thesis 10), Adam’s able to make his case to the audience—designers—who will eventually find themselves in the position of making decisions about the user experience of an everyware product.

And yet, we may find we’re surprisingly unprepared to do so. The bulk of UX practice—following from academic HCI work—depends on an understanding (or at least sensitivity towards) a user’s “goals” and the “tasks” she goes through to reach them—answering a research question, finding a gift for a friend, and so on. We often do research into users, developing personas intended to articulate these goals and tasks, which we then model as well-defined interchanges between a user and a system: the user does this, the system responds with that. But consider Adam’s description (from Thesis 09) of sitting down to work in an everyware-enabled office: “Whether or not you walked into the room in pursuance of a particular aim or goal, the system’s response to your arrival was probably tangential to that goal. Such an interaction can’t meaningfully be constructed as ‘task-driven.’ Nor does anything in it even correspond with the other main mode we see in human interaction with conventional computing systems, information seeking.” I think it could be argued that some areas of UX design (large-scale collaborative environments like Second Life in particular) have found ways to design contexts, rather than structures for task-completion. But for most designers, Adam’s making a profoundly important point: in everyware, there simply is no “call-and-response” between user and system to predict, model, and design. Interactions may not be initiated by the user at all when “the system precedes the user.” (In Thesis 18, Adam also suggests that the human actor can’t really be called a “user” in an Everyware context.)

Thinking of computing as “no longer task-driven” is extensively treated by Paul Dourish, whom Adam discusses briefly in Thesis 19 (“Everyware is always situated in a particular context”). Dourish has suggested that “task-driven interaction” has always been an illusion anyway. Eric Nehrlich summarizes that view concisely : “the specification of plans makes more sense after the action has occurred, because afterwards we can figure out what actions were relevant to the goal which we were trying to achieve.” In other words, a task like “editing a document” appears to be a procedural behavior only because we can reconstruct the steps that were involved in its successful completion. Dourish outlines a theory of “embodied interaction” appropriate to a relationship with technology that’s not representable by goals, tasks, and mouse clicks. If you’re interested in this stuff, Malcolm McCullough’s Digital Ground also looks at the design implications of pervasive computing and builds on Dourish’s work to explore many of the same issues (and a few of the same research projects) Adam covers in Everyware from a more theoretical perspective.

Designers who prefer a practical discussion around these issues should look at Johan Redström’s dissertation Designing Everyday Computational Things, which works out a framework for the design of ubicomp that complements Adam’s ethical one nicely. Redström’s project was “to develop a more general design philosophy for how to design computational things for presence in everyday life.” To do that, Redström documented his design of several products that he used to test his theoretical framework. Like Adam, Redström is especially concerned with the limited level of engagement that academic HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) research has had with real human values. He writes of the inevitable (and uninspiring) ‘time-saving’ benefits touted by ubicomp researchers:

Many [proposed] devices import values from the workplace into the home, emphasizing the requirements of ‘domestic work’ by allowing chores to be done more efficiently or productively. Others emphasize the desirability of taking ‘time off,’ allowing people to play unproductive games or access new forms of broadcast media. Other values seem rarely to be addressed at all. (Redström p18).

As you’d expect in a full dissertation, Redström provides a more thorough critical overview of the literature than Adam does in Everyware, including an insightful critique of the term “usability.”

Section 5 (“Who will determine everyware?”) is the shortest section of the Everyware, and perhaps its least satisfying. (Though this section has some of the book’s best writing: it’s dense, but conversational.) There’s a short bit on mashup culture here, and a reference to the developer’s “fast-cheap-good: pick two” whiteboard manifesto. But by and large, Adam’s answer to the question is that the big technology vendors (Philips, Sun, Sony) will probably have the largest say in the process, since the development of new technological infrastructures and standards are inevitably costly. Adam does point out that state and local regulatory bodies may be in the best position to impose standards (though not without difficulty), and makes reference to a few “student projects.” Unfortunately he doesn’t address the work of artists at all, even those who have directly engaged many of the issues he’s concerned with. That’s a shame. The RFID category on Regine Debatty’s we-make-money-not-art site is just bursting with weird and clever ubicomp experiments. Sure, there’s plenty of silly and trivial examples out there—an artist gluing an RFID chip to something does not constitute an interesting critical or artistic statement—but there’s plenty of good work that offers valuable and compelling comment on everyware. Julian Bleeker’s projects are whimsical and thoughtful. Design students at the Interaction Institute Ivrea have produced some interesting projects (and an excellent survey of RFID technology and ethics. Adam also doesn’t discuss established artist-designers like Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby or Natalie Jeremijenko. I’m surprised, since the work of all three is both critical and really approachable.

In fact, most examples Adam discusses are prototypes developed in corporate research labs, which raised some questions for me that aren’t addressed: does labeling prototypes as “future scenarios” (as most of these research groups do) serve to deflect criticism from them in any way? When Philips presents what is essentially a consumer application of surveillance technology as “just research”, does it make us less likely to hold them accountable? These aren’t just research projects; they’re PR and marketing projects as well. Adam does a great job of remaining critical throughout, but positioning everyware as something that only big corporations with research budgets engage in gives the impression it’s a phenomenon that individuals are powerless to affect. A discussion of the work of artists, students, and hackers would have provided some helpful balance to the conversation.

Section 6 (“When do we need to begin preparing for everyware?”) looks closely at what remaining social and technical barriers lie in the way of developing everyware: standards that either don’t yet exist or are still too young to be widely adopted; protocols and design processes that are from an earlier (web-centric) era of digital design; and maybe most importantly, that there’s currently no compelling value proposition for most potential users, no “killer app.” This section felt a little obligatory: the entire rest of the book had already convinced me that the time to begin preparing is right now (although some time ago would have been better), and that everyware’s a “hundred-year problem” that will only gradually replace current computing paradigms. I can see the point of calling this stuff out: it’s important to describe the current state of things in order to make the case that now is the time to make decisions. But Adam’s skeptical voice elsewhere in the book really isn’t as strong here, and parts of it are largely straight descriptions of the current state of various technologies and their marketers’ confident promises about them.

For instance, Thesis 59 (“The necessary processor speed already exists.”) describes Moore’s Law, and notes a few ways that processor speed could be distributed among nodes in an everyware context. Futurist extrapolations of “inevitable” capacity or speed, like “a human’s lifetime experiences will be stored on a device the size of a grain of sand” (p.197) are usually wrong. The history of technology in the long term is not the continued exponential growth curve that marketers would have us believe. Yes, storage is cheaper than in the past, chips are faster, but it’s not correct to assume these curves apply to technology systems as a whole. If tech curves were in fact exponential, we really would have by now bases on the moon (confidently predicted in the 1960’s), and homes would be powered by nuclear energy (predicted in the 1970’s). Cars reached a top speed of 100 mph in 1904 after only a few decades of development; the average car’s gas mileage today is no better than that of a 1908 Model T. Based on those early successes, it would have been reasonable to assume in 1910 that we’d be driving supersonic cars by now (not to mention flying in supersonic planes). Yes, many components of everyware exist, and in some places genuine everyware is already a reality. But Hong Kong’s “Octopus” paycard system may well be ubicomp’s Apollo moonshot: a success that happened to be an end, not a beginning.

I hope that if you haven’t already got Everyware, this review encourages you to pick it up. I’ve been reading Adam’s writing for about five years now, and Everyware is his best. He writes confidently and fluently here, and articulates a point of view unambiguously, something not all design writers can do well: “I mean to assert…that everyware, the regime of ambient informatics it gives rise to, and the condition of ambient findability they together entrain, will have significant and meaningful impact on the way you live your life and will do so before the first decade of the twenty-first century is out.” And though it’s almost impossible to avoid some jargon given the topic, he navigates a path between the technologist’s tendency towards acronyms and vaporware promises, and the designer’s love of meta-discussions and airy abstraction. Everyware’s tone is conversational, but it expects you to keep up: exactly what I want in books like this. This isn’t to say it’s all easy going. There are a lot of paragraphs in Everyware I had to read twice; it’s not Bruce Sterling’s easy ramble of tech words duct-taped together. There are also some flat-out great sentences here: “But it wouldn’t have taken a surplus of imagination, even ahead of the fact, to discern Napster latent in Paul Baran’s first paper on packet-switched networks, the Manhattan skyline in the Otis safety elevator patent, or the suburb and the strip mall latent in the heart of the internal combustion engine.”

A note about citing sources

Everyware contains no citations, and lacks a bibliography (though Adam’s posted one at the book’s website). This is a disappointing omission, and I’m a little surprised that the New Riders editors allowed it. It’s just maddening to read lines like “PARC’s Victoria Bellotti and her co-authors pointed out, in a 2002 paper…” without a pointer to the source¹. Missing citations go over very badly in the research and academic communities, the same communities which Adam has heavily relied on for his own work. I don’t mean to single Everyware out—it’s hardly the first book in our field to omit footnotes. But I worry the lack of them here will limit Everyware’s usefulness outside of an audience of designers or casual readers. That’s a shame. Given the urgency the case Adam makes, everyware is as much a social issue as technological. Considering how accessible Everyware is, I can easily imagine it wielding some influence in policy-making had it been more rigorously documented.

¹ (It’s from Making Sense of Sensing Systems: Five Questions for Designers and Researchers ; In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems: Changing Our World, Changing Ourselves (Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, April 20 - 25, 2002). CHI ‘02. ACM Press, New York, NY, 415-422.)

Posted by Andrew at December 26, 2006 12:37 PM

Comments

Posted by: AG at December 26, 2006 12:58 PM

Posted by: heyotwell at December 26, 2006 01:15 PM

Posted by: Bruce Sterling at December 26, 2006 04:00 PM

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