UbiComp - Coming to a Society Near You
I recently heard part of a program on CBC Radio’s show Ideas. It was called “By Design: The Politics of Everyday Objects” and the website description is thus: We tend to take the objects around us, from paper clips to bridges, for granted, remarking only when they’re either annoying to use, or impossibly elegant. Why do everyday objects look the way they do, and why are we so often saddled with clunky, ugly things?
I’m very sorry that I missed most of the broadcast, because what I did hear I found very intriguing. In one part, a guest was commenting on how technology overpowers the actions of the user. For example, I might be working at my dining room table on my baby’s scrapbook; I could be reaching into the mail box for a birthday card; I could be standing at my kitchen counter making a grocery list from a recipe; I could be sprawled on the floor playing a game with my child. None of these activities would be worthy of a comment on the tools I was using. But if I was sitting at my computer I could be doing all these things and an observer wouldn’t know it. To the witness, I’m merely “at the computer” (and perhaps for a very long time, as my poor game-head husband knows).
Ubiquitous computing is striving for the computer to be as invisible as the pencil. The tool should not overwhelm the task.
Personally, I think a better analogy would be to electricity. We use electricity in almost everything we do from the morning alarm clock, coffee pot, chilled juice and milk, to the card key pass to the office, the voice mail….the computer.
We only think about electricity when it isn’t there. A power outage can have devasting consequences if it lasts any length of time - particularly in small or isolated communities.
It’s true that computing is approaching the level of electricity in terms of our daily reliance on it. The aforementioned card key, pay at the pump gas, point of sale debit purchasing, email and text messaging, and banking. It’s hard to imagine a routine task that doesn’t touch on a computer in some way.
So, will even greater reliance prove to make computing less about the tech and more just flipping a light switch? Or will it make the power outage that much more inconvenient?