How aesthetically beautiful are your photos? Try out Acquine, an Aesthetic Quality Inference Engine. Welcome to the brave new world of computational aesthetics!

Clever – video of evolving a human face using a genetic algorithm. A face detector is used for the fitness function.

Time to start gaming for mental health?

Haunting and beautiful sand art “animation” – very neat and worth the 9 minutes.

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.

In the Wired article “Where’s My Personalized Medicine?” you can read more about existing methods that enable personalisation of drugs. In the longer term it should be feasible to create drugs that are optimally adapted based on individual differences in genetic makeup (Pharmacogenetics).

Most of the research and projects I’ve mentioned so far have tended to enable the user to have more freedom by giving them more control. The user is in charge of personalising and adapting.

In personalised medicines we find an example where it probably isn’t feasible or acceptable to let the user design and adapt the (non-recreational) drugs. Are there certain objects that should be adaptive to the user without letting the user explicitly adapt them? Are there certain things that should be fixed in form and function? If so what are the characteristics of adaptive (that which adapts to the user) but not adaptable (that which the user can alter) objects?

On a separate but related point: I wonder what home medicine cabinets will be like in the future? Will they have a spit here slot which when used causes the cabinet to quickly sequence your genome and then pop out some individualised pills? Or could it be far more subtle where when you use the restroom the toilet paper gets automatically infused with personalised medicines? Wipe your way to a healthy lifestyle!