Genevieve Bell

Yesterday’s tomorrows: notes on ubiquitous computing’s dominant vision

Ubiquitous computing is unusual amongst technological research arenas. Most areas of computer science research, such as programming language implementation, distributed operating system design, or denotational semantics, are defined largely by technical problems, and driven by building upon and elaborating a body of past results. Ubiquitous computing, by contrast, encompasses a wide range of disparate technological areas brought together by a focus upon a common vision. It is driven, then, not so much by the problems of the past but by the possibilities of the future. Ubiquitous computing’s vision, however, is over a decade old at this point, and we now inhabit the future imagined by its pioneers. The future, though, may not have worked out as the field collectively imagined. In this article, we explore the vision that has driven the ubiquitous computing research agenda and the contemporary practice that has emerged. Drawing on cross-cultural investigations of technology adoption, we argue for developing a “ubicomp of the present” which takes the messiness of everyday life as a central theme.

The Infrastructure of Experience and the Experience of Infrastructure: Meaning and Structure in Everyday Encounters with Space

Although the current developments in ubiquitous and pervasive computing are driven largely by technological opportunities, they have radical implications not just for technology design but also for the ways in which we experience and interact with computation. In particular, the move of computation ‘off the desktop’ and into the world, whether embedded in the environment around us or carried or worn on our bodies, suggests that computation is beginning to manifest itself in new ways as an aspect of the everyday environment. One particularly interesting issue in this transformation is the move from a concern with virtual spaces to a concern with physical ones. Basically, once computation moves off the desktop, computer science suddenly has to be concerned with where it might have gone. Whereas computer science and human-computer interaction have previously been concerned with disembodied cognition, they must now look more directly at embodied action and bodily encounters between people and technology. In this paper, we explore some of the implications of the development of ubiquitous computing for encounters with space. We look on space here as infrastructure—not just a technological infrastructure, but an infrastructure through which we experience the world. Drawing on studies of both the practical organization of space and the cultural organization of space, we begin to explore the ways in which ubiquitous computing may condition, and be conditioned by, the social organization of everyday space.

No more SMS from Jesus : ubicomp, religion and techno-spiritual practices

Over the last decade, new information and communication technologies have lived a secret life. For individuals and institutions around the world, this constellation of mobile phones, personal computers, the internet, software, games, and other computing objects have supported a complex set of religious and spiritual needs. In this paper, I offer a survey of emerging and emergent techno-spiritual practices, and the anxieties surrounding their uptake. I am interested in particular in the ways in which religious uses of technology represent not only a critique of dominant visions of technology’s futures, but also suggest a very different path(s) for ubiquitous computing’s technology envisioning and development.

Designing culturally situated technologies for the home

As digital technologies proliferate in the home, the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) community has turned its attention from the workplace and productivity tools towards domestic design environments and non-utilitarian activities. In the workplace, applications tend to focus on productivity and efficiency and involve relatively well-understood requirements and methodologies, but in domestic design environments we are faced with the need to support new classes of activities. While usability is still central to the field, HCI is beginning to address considerations such as pleasure, fun, emotional effect, aesthetics, the experience of use, and the social and cultural impacts of new technologies. These considerations are particularly relevant to the home, where technologies are situated or embedded within an ecology that is rich with meaning and nuance.The aim of this workshop is to explore ways of designing domestic technology by incorporating an awareness of cultural context, accrued social meanings, and user experience.

Back to the shed: gendered visions of technology and domesticity

One of the tropes of the age of ubiquitous computing is the migration of computation into new spaces. Domestic environments have been a particular focus of attention for many. However, these spaces are neither empty nor neutral. They are already populated by people and practices which shape both their physical form and cultural meaning. We want to consider here some questions of technology and domesticity. In order to give some critical perspective, we want to approach domestic space from the edge, and in particular, from the shed.

Techniques for researching and designing global products in an unstable world: a case study

The value of ethnographic field work for guiding and inspiring product design is indisputable, especially for development teams working on products for other cultures. However, global instability can make it difficult or impossible for researchers and product designers to travel to foreign countries to conduct field work, leaving them ill equipped to guide culturally-appropriate product design. In this paper, we present a series of ethnographically-inspired techniques that allow researchers and development teams to gather a range of culturally relevant information for product design without visiting the countries for which they are designing. These techniques are not intended to substitute for on-the-ground ethnographic fieldwork, rather, they are intended to serve as a surrogate until further in-situ research can be conducted.

Intimate computing

In this column, the author explores the closeness and its implications for computing. Anthropologists and other social scientists often discuss new technologies as if they were more than simply devices. Computing technology is also linked to cultural scripts around such values as efficiency and rationality. The desktop PC computing paradigm is rapidly giving way to a more complicated and nuanced vision of computing technologies and power.

Teaching Intel to love the television

Over the last decade, as Intel Corporation has successively sought to expand its business into consumer electronics adjacencies, it envisioned a spectrum of screens in homes that could serve as interchangeable front-ends to a relatively standard computational back-end. From this perspective, televisions, set top boxes, and other CE devices are fraternal twins to Intels traditional competency, silicon solutions for the PC. In this video, the authors discuss how Intels User Experience Group has steered the company to accept the television for what it truly is, a fundamentally different device, experience, and ecosystem than the PC. Drawing on ethnographic research data from 21 countries, collected over three years, they detail how teaching Intel to love the television has meant driving consumer-centric perspectives of the role, place, and meaning of television in global homes into Intels Digital Home Groups strategy and platform roadmaps. This has meant abandoning the idea that “a screen is just a screen,” and that interactive, connected, and smart televisions will be PCs disguised to blend with living room aesthetics.

Entertainment media at home: looking at the social aspects

Introduction Historically, experiences of computing and computational devices themselves were largely restricted to the office. In recent years, however, there has been a proliferation of other kinds of domains and usage practices. From forms of public and urban computing, virtual/real gaming, mobile handsets, wireless infrastructure and even the ever present visions of smart-homes and digital lifestyles, increasing computational technologies and experiences thereof have found their ways into new domains. These nascent ubiquitous computing technologies have brought with them the potential for remarkable change. However, these new domains also suggest new challenges and new dilemmas. For instance, any exploration of the role of new information and communications technologies in the home highlight some of the critical disconnections between the ways in which such technologies are produced and the ways in which they are consumed, naturalized and rejected. Clearly, the home is far too broad a topic for a single Copyright is held by the author/owner(s).

Information as a cultural category

One of the questions that invariably comes up when discussing ambient intelligence is the thorny problem of just what the term might mean. It’s catchy and provocative, but attempts to define it tend to be unsatisfying. Sometimes, of course, a slogan of this sort can productively inspire without necessarily being crisply defined, and so it is with “ambient intelligence.” However, it is still worth taking the question of meaning seriously. Our concern here is not simply with the meanings of the words around which we define our work, but with what kinds of meanings they might have, with where those meanings come from, and with their consequences.