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The first wave of computing, from 1940 to
about 1980, was dominated by many people
serving one computer. The second wave, still
peaking, has one person and one computer in
uneasy symbiosis, staring at each other
across the desktop without really inhabiting
each other's worlds. The third wave, just
beginning, has many computers serving each
person everywhere in the world. I call this
last wave "ubiquitous computing" or
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PRIVATE MACROBUTTON HtmlDirect * PRIVATE | MACROBUTTON HtmlDirect *Over the next twenty years computers will
inhabit the most trivial things: clothes
labels (to track washing), coffee cups (to
alert cleaning staff to moldy cups), light
switches (to save energy if no one is in the
room), and pencils (to digitize everything
we draw). In such a world, we must dwell
with computers, not just interact with them.
Interacting with something keeps it distant
and foreign. If you are only interacting
with your spouse the relationship may be in
trouble. We dwell with nature, and
roommates, and anything that we let enter
us, and we it. Dwelling with computers means
that they have their place, and we ours, and
we co-exist comfortably. Unfortunately, our
existing metaphors for computers (and
nature, for that matter) are inadequate to
describe the "dwelling" relationship. And no
metaphor is more misleading than "smart". PRIVATE MACROBUTTON HtmlDirect
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PRIVATE MACROBUTTON HtmlDirect * PRIVATE | MACROBUTTON HtmlDirect *"Smart House": Does this mean any more than
a house with a computer in it? Does it mean
anything like "Better House"? Do we really
think that everything in the world would be
better if it were smarter? Smart
Cappuccino? Smart Park? The "Smart House"
of 1935 had an electric light in every room.
The "Smart House" of 1955 dared to put a TV
and a telephone in every room. And the
"Smart House" of 2005 will have computers in
every room. But what will they do?
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I believe that the smart house of 2005 will
be a lot like the smart house of 1801, which
had a *book* in every room. Those books
brought other worlds and ideas into the
homes and minds of the time. Similarly, the
imbedded computers of 2005 will bring other
worlds to us in new ways-- sometimes in ways
so unobtrusive we will not even notice our
increased ability for informed action.
We will dwell with these computers, whose
presence we will ignore most of the time,
and they will provide us with constant clues
about our environment, our loved ones, our
own past, the objects around us and the
world beyond our home. Computers will act
like books, windows, walks around the block,
phone calls to relatives. They won't replace
these, but augment them, make them easier,
more fun.
Dwelling with computers, they
become part of the informing environment,
like weather, like street sounds. A house
that is true to its house nature must have a
certain quiet, even stolidness. Through a
thousand subtle cues, computers will help
turn our houses into homes. PRIVATE MACROBUTTON HtmlDirect PRIVATE MACROBUTTON HtmlDirect * PRIVATE MACROBUTTON HtmlDirect * PRIVATE ALIGN=bottom SRC="gifs/open16.jpeg" MACROBUTTON HtmlResImg PRIVATE ALIGN=bottom SRC="gifs/open28.jpeg" MACROBUTTON HtmlResImg PRIVATE ALIGN=bottom SRC="gifs/open27.jpeg" MACROBUTTON HtmlResImg
A few examples of how some of these
clues might work: the kind of tune the
computer plays to wake me up will tell me
something about my first few appointments
of the day. A quickurgent tune: 8am
important meeting. Quiet, reflective
music: nothing until noon.
Once woodsmen could walk through the
forest and see the signs of all the animals
that had passed by in the previous few
hours. Similarly, my see-through display
and picture window will show me the traces
of the neighborhood as faintly glowing
trails: purple for cats, red for dogs,
green for people, other colors
as I request. PRIVATE MACROBUTTON HtmlDirect PRIVATE MACROBUTTON HtmlDirect *
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What of the alienating effects of so much
technology? Good for you if you're
concerned; don't take any engineer's word
for how great it will be. But mediation is a
red herring. As Donna Harraway says, to be
human is to be a cyborg. There is no
"natural" experience: the eyeball, the
middle ear, the visual cortex, are far more
sophisticated than the personal computer.
And a computer can be suggestive without
being intermediating. In the above example,
the computer's choice of music does not
force my mood. I may know the 8am event is a
pushover, or that I have the morning open
only because I left time to prepare for the
killer afternoon salary review. It offers a
point of view, nothing more.
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PRIVATE MACROBUTTON HtmlDirect *Ubiquitous computing will not make our
houses "smarter". It is commonly believed
that thinking makes one smart. But it's
frequently the opposite: in many situations,
the less you have to think about the smarter
you are. Who's smarter, the beginning piano
student who thinks about each note, or the
artist who thinks about the music and lets
the notes take care of themselves? Who's
smarter, Deep Blue analyzing billions of
moves, or Kasparov, who wins the game after
analyzing three hundred?
In each case the
expert can think about *less* because long
practice has made it unnecessary to attend
to the details. Previous revolutions in
computing were about bigger, better, faster,
smarter. In the next revolution, as we learn
to make machines that take care of our
unconscious details, we might finally have
smarter people.
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PRIVATE MACROBUTTON HtmlDirect *We become smarter as we put our roots deeper
into what is around us. The house of the
future will become one giant connection to
the world-- quietly and unobtrusively, as
naturally as we know it is raining, or cold,
or that someone is up before us in the
kitchen making breakfast.
Ubiquitous computing just might help to
free our minds from unnecessary work, and
connect us to the fundamental challenge
that humans have always had:
to understand the patterns in the
universe and ourselves within them.
* Written for Review, the web magazine of the Interactive Telecommunications Program of New York University. Appeared in March 1996, ITP Review 2.0. http://www.itp.tsoa.nyu.edu/~review/
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