Devices are clearly everywhere, but the connections between them seem infrequent and poor.

Why is ubiquitous technology still so … well un-ubiquitous?

Why bother

One reason for lack of connectivity, is that for each production and purchase decision there is little need for it.  It is possible to wire up your whole home with sensors as Andy Stanford-Clark‘s twittering house demonstrates.  But for most people why put sensors in your home unless they are for something?  Why bother to buy things unless they give you value now? Home security, central hearing control, warning you when your fuel is running low — these are reasons for sensors, but in general we tend to buy things that do things for us, not things that might possibly plug together to do something interesting. This is maybe even more true of the new generation of digital natives, brought up with single function toys, and even Lego in  pre-determined models rather than generic kits.

Of course, we do buy things with sensors, the electric kettle has a temperature sensor, the TV knows what channel is tuned — but these are single purpose.  Even SCART connections for TV/DVD/satellite boxes are pretty limited unless the devices expect to be chained.  For the manufacturer, why bother to make stand-alone devices connectible; it will cost more in terms of a wireless chip, not to mention complex interfaces to manage privacy.  Even software rarely takes this step to make itself easy to interconnect — despite the mash-culture of Web2.0.  The barcode reader app on the iPhone is a rare exception; here the cost was relatively low and purely in  software (up front cost, but no cost per ‘device’), and yet even this is rare to see.  Once there are hardware costs even generic devices such as phones only include sensors for which they can see an immediate use: for ecxample, despite the presence of GPS and compass in the iPhone, the new iPad, with sightly different expected uses, has neither.  For physical devices, connectivity may come when individual devices require external interfaces, maybe to manage complex installations or monitoring via mini-webservers for less cost than dedicated displays, just as with most home routers.  Then the hardware cost of connectivity has a purpose for the dedicated device, and the additional cost of genericity is software only.

What’s there

It is interesting to look back at Mark Weiser‘s original vision of ubiquitous computing.  It is less connected than Adam’s ‘everywhere’, but equally rooted in research prototypes and potential, and yet has certainly come to pass as computation is certainly ‘ubiquitous’ in many ways.  Like others, I have always been struck by the disconnect between the opening words of Weiser’s The Computer for the 21st Century “The most profound technologies are those that disappear” and the rest of the paper, which focused on displays the visible face of computation.  But, with the exception of miniature MP3 players,  it is precisely these visible displays that are part of our lives.

Weiser classified displays into tabs, pads and boards, with associated scales (inch, foot, yard), and indeed the size of displays is crucial to their uses¹.  However, it is perhaps better to look at Wesier’s definitons of where and how these are used: tabs are ‘on things’ microwaves, some TV remotes, and old mobile phones (the kind that were primarily for telephoning people!), pads are held and carried and while decidely smaller than an foot, the iPhone and similar smartphones are clearly in this category, and finally boards are in the environment, stuck on walls (digital photo frames) and furniture (Microsoft surface).  All can be seen in many homes and offices, although the latter have perhaps had least impact so far,  laregly because of costs of production (foreseen by Wesier), but are clearly coming on stream.

The crucial thing is that all of these displays do something for us.  They are ubiquitous because they are not invisible.

How to use them

Adam’s book describes the profoundly different user experience of ‘everywhere’ interactions (pp:27-39), rather than being task-driven by the user, in situations such as such as automatic room lights “the system precedes the user“, “Whether or not you walk into the room in pursuance of a particular aim or goal, the system’s reaction to your arrival is probably tangential to that goal.“.  This what I have previosly called ‘incidental interaction‘, interactions not driven by the user’s immediate intentions, but by the system’s actions for the user.

Somewhat strangely the discussion in ‘Everywhere’ then turns to Bellotti et al’s “Making sense of sensing systems: five questions for designers and researchers“, which summarises some of the key issues of pervasive systems dating back to the 1984 Phone Slave project², such as knowing how to address a system that has no keyboard and knowing whether it is attending.  These are really important issues, but are about intentional use, getting the system, albeit embedded in the environment, to do something that the user has decided. At a more device level,  Abricht Schimdt‘s concept of implicit interaction³ is also in this area, making the interaction to achieve some purpose as natural and invisible as possible using sensors such as accelerometers. This is now common in devices such as the iPhone, but is still essentially about intentional interaction — again getting the device to do something.

In contrast, we seem to still have little understanding of the user experience of incidental interactions, where the system spontaneously does things for or to us, and they are still rare in the home and office, a few specific devices such as automatic lights, doors and central heating controllers, with little sign of widespread connectivity.  The main exceptions seem to be at a very large scale, Amazon book recommendations or traffic management systems.

The latter is perhaps an interesting comment on ubiquity as, for the ordinary user, the display is simply a red light.

1. see recent papers with Corina Sas “Mobile Personal Devices meet Situated Public Displays: Synergies and Opportunities” and with Lucia Terrenghi and Aaron Quigley “A taxonomy for and analysis of multi-person-display ecosystems“, which extend this size classification to larger and smaller displays. [back]
2. See “Phone Slave: A Graphical Telecommunications Interface” and YouTube video, although it was the longer envusonment video, that raised the user interaction design questions. [back]
3. Schmidt, A. Implicit Human Computer Interaction Through Context. Personal Technologies, 4(2&3), Springer-Verlag, 191–199, 2000 [back]

One of the critical things about the design was that while earlier designs used steel, his design needed to be made out of plastic.  Steel is an obvious material for a lock: strong unyielding; however the plastic lock worked because the lock and the bin around it were designed to yield, to give a little, and is so doing to absorb the shock if kicked by a drunken passer-by.

This is a sort of Judo principle of design: rather than trying to be the strongest or toughest, instead by  yielding in the right way using the strength of your opponent.

This reminded me of trees that bend in the wind and stand the toughest storms (the wind howling down the chimney maybe helps the image), whereas those that are stiffer may break.  Also old wooden pit-props that would moan and screech when they grew weak and gave slightly under the strain of rock; whereas the stronger steel replacements would stand firm and unbending until the day they catastrophically broke.

Years ago I also read about a programme to strengthen bridges as lorries got heavier.  The old arch bridges had an infill of loose rubble, so the engineers simply replaced this with concrete.  In a short time the bridges began to fall down.  When analysed more deeply  the reason become clear.  When an area of the loose infill looses strength, it gives a little, so the strain on it is relieved and the areas around take the strain instead.  However, the concrete is unyielding and instead the weakest point takes more and more strain until eventually cracks form and the bridge collapses.  Twisted ropes work on the same principle.  Although now an old book, “The New Science of Strong Materials” opened my eyes to the wonderful way many natural materials, such as bone, make use of the relative strengths, and weaknesses, of their constituents, and how this is emulated in many composite materials such as glass fibre or carbon fibre.

In contrast both software and bureaucratic procedures are more like chains – if any link breaks the whole thing fails.

Steve’s lock design shows that it is possible to use the principle of strength in weakness when using modern materials, not only in organic elements like wood, or traditional bridge design.  For software also, one of the things I often try to teach is to design for failure – to make sure things work when they go wrong.  In particular, for intelligent user interfaces the idea of appropriate intelligence – making sure that when intelligent algorithms get things wrong, the user experience does not suffer.  It is easy to want to design the cleverest algotithms, the most complex systems – to design for everything, to make it all perfect. While it is of course right to seek the best, often it is the knowledge that what we produce will not be ‘perfect’ that in fact enables us to make it better.