Adam Greenfield on the Rise of Ubiquitous Computing

In the July issue of Interactions magazine I came across an interview with Adam Greenfield. The article, titled At the End of the World Plant a Tree, featured six questions from a lengthy interview that was conducted by Tish Shute in February of this year. As soon as I finished reading this condensed version I made my way to UgoTrade.com to access the full interview, which is well worth the time.

This interview was my introduction to Greenfield and many of his fascinating and thought-provoking ideas. Adam is currently leading Nokia's design direction for services and user-interface. The

 focus of this piece is on ideas that he explores in his soon to be released book The City is Here for You To Use.

This upcoming release is Adam's second book, he also keeps a blog called Speedbird and has released an interesting pamphlet called "Urban Computing and Its Discontents". All of his publications investigate the potential shape and impact of ubi-comp on modern life. His first book, titled Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, often made it into my amazon cart, though I never choose to purchase it due to my lack of familiarity with Adam (this is something I plan to remedy shortly).

Interesting topics covered in the interview:

• Definition of relevant concepts such as "onto" and "ontomes". Ontomes refer to a global environment of addressable, queryable, scriptable objects (e.g. the class of objects), while onto refers to any given such object that is part of this environment (e.g. an object instance). These terms are closely related to the concept of "spimes" that was created by Bruce Sterling.
  
• Conversations regarding evolving perspectives regarding the nature of ubiquitous systems. From Mark Weiser's vision of computers fading into the background, where they appear when needed and disappear when not in use, to Yvonne Rogers’ vision of computers supporting engaged living, helping people engage more actively in things that they do rather than do things for them.
• Discussion regarding Greenfield's principles of ubiquitous computing. These principles are ultimately "codifications of common sense and basic neighborly virtues, expressed in language appropriate to the domain of application."
• Viewpoints on the potential impact of ubiquitous technologies on our society's ability to instigate the necessary changes to create sustainable living practices and lifestyles. Adam's view on this topic is quite skeptical. "sometime in the next sixty years or so a convergence of Extremely Bad Circumstances is going to put an effective end to our ability to conduct highly ordered and highly energy-intensive civilization on this planet." 
• Concerns regarding how to enable individuals to manage privacy at three distinct levels: secrecy ("data [that] should not be readable by or understandable by anybody except me or people I designate"), anonymity ("data [that] should be seen by anybody but about whom it is should be knowable only by me or people that I designate"), and autonomy ("my right to live under circumstances which reinforce my sense that I am in control of my own fate"). 

[picture taken by Pepe Makkonen]

Data Should Inform But Not Determine

In this entry I will continue to explore the implications of the growing trend related to the creation of measurement and tracking systems for the optimization of life. On my previous post I failed to adress the impact of our decisions regarding what to measure on the way we lead our lives.

As we continue to leverage data to support and guide our actions and decisions, the selection of what to measure will become increasingly important. What we measure will identify what we deem to be most important, and will provide a foundation for our actions and decision making. In other words, the data will serve as a reflection of our world view as well as a basis for the reality that we strive to bring into existence in our life.

As a consequence the information systems that we create, which processes this information, will also grow in importance. It will play an enabling and limiting role in our lives. In the word of Terry Winograd , in "designing information systems we design ways of being." This will be more true than ever before as technology encroaches in the day-to-day lives of most individuals (at least in industrialized nations), no longer relegated to professional organizations and pursuits. Lawrence Lessig shared the same idea in his famous quote "code is law".

What does this all mean to me - it is now more important than ever that the creation of information systems be guided by the interests and active involvement of people that come from all different avenues within our society (rather than merely engineers, developers and programmers). 

Also, echoing a sentiment from my previous post, as individuals we need to remember to empower ourselves rather than data from outside. We can't loose sight that the data we are capturing and processing is ultimately nothing more than a guide posts that we have selected. The choices we make should be informed by data but not determined by it.

Monitoring, Tracking, and Behavior Changing

During the past several months there has been an upsurge in interest about the behavioral changing potential offered by new monitoring and tracking technologies.

The July issue of Wired magazine ran a cover story titled "Living by Numbers: Track your data. Analyze results. Optimize your life. " This piece focused on the emergence of monitoring and tracking technologies that have become available across a wide range of areas. Recent issues of Make and Interactions, respectively titled "Remake America" and "The Waste Manifesto", magazines also focused on possibilities created by these technologies to help us reduce waste and live in more a more sustainable manner.

These technologies enable individuals and communities to generate data regarding various types of activities and the impact of these activities, and then to leverage this data for various purposes ranging from behavioral change (e.g. tracking your runs for performance improvement, as in Nike+ ), to scientific research (e.g. making available personal data for aggregate analysis) and artistic self-expression (e.g. capturing data for lifestreaming, a la Nicholas Feltron).

These various new technologies provide us the opportunity to understand more about, and to impact, our current behavior at individual and community levels. However, the existence of these technologies is not sufficient to drive positive change. we must now design and discover compelling and effective ways to implement these technologies to help individuals and communities to achieve their goals. Articles in both Wired and Make magazines showcase examples where the sharing of data, and the development of games related to this sharing, has helped drive change for individuals and communities.

As we look for opportunities to dissect and analyze our life with these tools we need to be mindful that not everything can be parsed into measurable units for tracking and monitoring.

Life is much more than what can be grasped and measured by our rational mind. We need to remember that all the optimizing in the world is not the solution to make us happier or more fulfilled. If we reduce our experience of life and reality to metrics (in the form of numbers and words) that our mind can easily classify and optimize we will miss out on an important part of the experience of life, which is unmeasurable. At least that is my half-assed new age-y spiritual beliefs lead me to surmise.

The Medium is Behavior

Here is a short list of interesting posts that I came accross earlier today, enjoy...

Earlier today I came across an interesting, though disappointingly short, post on Core 77 about the keynote speech from the Interaction 09 conference. This conference, recently held in Vancouver, featured an interesting keynote from Robert Fabricant. In his speech, Robert outlined his thesis that "Interaction Design is not about computing technology, it's about behavior. Behavior = our medium." His theory is based on the premise that the evolution of interactive technologies has changed our relationship not with information, but also our ideas about what constitutes proper behavior. He goes on to convingly argue about the power that interaction design yelds to impact behavior. [since I didn't attend this conference, all of my knowledge is second-hand].

Another interesting feature currently available on Corre77 is the Greener Gadget Design Competition. The design brief for this competition was for designers to explore the concept of "Greener Gadgets." They were asked to develop consumer electronic prototypes that consider the environmental impact of their designs multiple levels: energy, materials, lifecycle, recicyling, social impact, and educational development. Two of my favorite gadgets are: the Bware Water Meter helps you measure how much water you are using (I already have an alternative idea to this one that I want to develop and market); the Blight blinds capture energy from the sun during the day and function as lights during the night time;

Lastly, since we are on the topic of gadgets I recommend checking a post from Mashables titled 6 Gadget Trends and Their Effects on Social Media. This piece provides a brief overview of 6 interesting technologies that are quickly gaining in adoption. What are these trends?

1. Social TV enabled by services such as Boxee, Netflix and Sling allows you to watch all your favorite shows streaming on your TV. You can then automatically share playlist and comments with your friends.
   
2. High definition geo-tagged content enabled by the advent of mobile phones with hi-res cameras and GPS functionality
3. Real-time uploading of content offered by mobile phones and photo and video cameras with special data cards that offer wireless upload capabilities.
   
4. Gaming immersion continues to spread as gaming expands to new devices that are increasingly connected, enableing users to maintain centralized profiles that aggregate their game scores from multiple platforms.
5. Pico projection is here. Now you can get pocket-sized projectors for under $400. These little guys are also beginning to make their way into cellphones and other GPS and communication-laden devices.
6. The rise of the pocket bands and mobile phone musicians. The craze in iPhone and Android music applications continues to spread. Check out these Yamaha music-phone prototypes.