Time for another Creativity Knowledge. Today I’m pointing you towards Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp), aka. Calm Technology.

How could you make shopping for food easier?

Imagine making a shopping list on your computer. As you head out the door to the supermarket the shopping list automatically stores itself on your mobile phone. Of course you’re always forgetting to buy milk. So your phone talks to the fridge and makes sure you’ve enough milk for the rest of the week. When you walk into the supermarket your phone gives the shopping list to the shopping trolley you’ve grabbed. Now you can easily see your shopping list on a small screen built into the trolley. As you put items into the trolley they are removed from the on-screen list.

In the meantime the trolley has talked with the shop and figured out the optimal route to get around the shop with the least congestion and fastest time. As you push the trolley around the trolley wheels subtly vary resistance, so it becomes easier to move the trolley in one direction or another. By dynamically varying wheel resistance you are unconsciously guided in different directions, such as towards a special offer and away from paths other customers are moving along.

Your shoes have also downloaded a layout of the store. While you walk around the height and softness of the shoe soles varies subtly enough that you don’t consciously notice, but they lean (and maybe lead) you away from the sweet and fast food sections. Yep, your partner has told your phone to tell your shoes that you are on a diet!

The above design scenario captures many of the ideas of Ubicomp. Background non-intrusive technologies making your life easier by weaving themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it (from The Computer for the 21st Century).

While there is much to admire in the Ubicomp vision I often dislike one possible implication: We may become automatons of clever technologies that guide, steer and influence us “for our benefit” without us being aware of what is happening.

Mark Weiser laid out the original vision for Ubiquitous Computing in The Computer for the 21st Century, and in the essay he co-wrote with John Seely Brown, Designing Calm Technology. Both essays were, and in many ways still are, an inspiring human centered vision of the less-traveled path I (Mark Weiser) call the “invisible”; its highest ideal is to make a computer so imbedded, so fitting, so natural, that we use it without even thinking about it.

Mark identified Ubiquitous computing as the third wave in computing, just now beginning. First were mainframes, each shared by lots of people. Now we are in the personal computing era, person and machine staring uneasily at each other across the desktop. Next comes ubiquitous computing, or the age of calm technology, when technology recedes into the background of our lives.

His introduction to Designing Calm Technology convincingly describes an installation art work that embodies what he envisioned:
Created by artist Natalie Jeremijenko, the “Dangling String” is an 8 foot piece of plastic spaghetti that hangs from a small electric motor mounted in the ceiling. The motor is electrically connected to a nearby Ethernet cable, so that each bit of information that goes past causes a tiny twitch of the motor. A very busy network causes a madly whirling string with a characteristic noise; a quiet network causes only a small twitch every few seconds. Placed in an unused corner of a hallway, the long string is visible and audible from many offices without being obtrusive. It is fun and useful. The Dangling String meets a key challenge in technology design for the next decade: how to create calm technology.

A collection of Mark’s essays, papers and presentations about Ubicomp are available on this website. Separately there are many research papers available online from Ubicomp conferences, e.g. Ubicomp 2008, Pervasive 2008.

So where are we now? How has the field progressed since Weiser first coined the term Ubiquitous Computing in 1988?

A very good critique paper is Yesterday’s tomorrows: notes on ubiquitous computing’s dominant vision by Genevieve Bell and Paul Dourish. In that paper they outline some of the failings and opportunities due to the massive influence Mark’s original vision had on Ubicomp. I particularly like their observations that in many ways we are already living in a Ubicomp world – technology and our lifestyles have merged over the last decade. Also of interest is their observation that Ubicomp environments are inherently messy.

During the talk he discusses the implications of some experiments which demonstrate that giving people choice doesn’t necessarily lead to increased satisfaction, and can even have the opposite effect. More choice may impact upon the formation of Synthetic Happiness.

In one (free-choice paradigm) experiment people were given a choice of six Monet prints. They had to rank the prints according to desirability. Then they were told they could have one of prints ranked third or fourth. A few weeks later the same people were asked to re-rank the same set of prints. Lo and behold the print they had was ranked higher than the one they originally preferred most!

They were happier with what they had than what they didn’t have. Some follow on research established that if there was the possibility they could change their choice they would be less inclined to be happy with what they had.

In an Introduction to Cognitive Dissonance there’s a more detailed description of the first free-choice paradigm experiment run by J.W. Brehm in 1956. If you’re interested you could have a look at the related “spreading of alternatives”.

I wonder what are the implications of a malleable world for the generation of synthetic happiness? Will people be more dissatisfied because they constantly have a choice about altering the physical and functional form of their objects (e.g. phones, door handles, etc) and tools?

I haven’t played with Ning (yet) but based on the video and from reading around it sounds like the commoditization of software infrastructures for social software.

The implications of Ning and cohorts are that we can expect to see lots of small social networks. Are there certain thresholds for small social networks? Will there be too much choice in a small social network? If you have a bunch of friends, say around 20 connected people, will they drown in too many options?

By giving people so many avenues of communication and interaction you could reduce the amount of shared virtual space between a group of friends. For example I often come across quiet web forums with lots and lots of different sub-forums. Each of those sub-forums commonly only has a few threads consisting of a scattering of posts made by different users, and often the posts are widely spread out in time. If you count the total number of posts on the forums there is activity but because the posts are so spread out between different sub-forums and threads the forum feels empty and devoid of participation. Will the same thing happen with small social networks? Do too many ways of contributing and interacting encourage small social networks to die?

Related to that I wonder will people become overloaded with update choice? Should they update their blogs, their photos, their videos, their profiles, leave comments on members blogs, or respond to comments on forums, etc, etc? All that content creation via so many paths sounds like time consuming work.

Mind you automatically pulling together and mashing together (via Ning, RSS, etc) people’s online contributions might help create a community and sense of focus – a village square.