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]

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.
   

Book Summary: Where the Action Is - The Foundations of Embodied Interaction - Chapter 4

Where the Action Is; The Foundations of Embodied Interaction
By Paul Dourish
MIT Press, 2001

Chapter 4 – Being in the World: Embodied Interaction

Dourish contends that embodiment is an attribute of how we experience physical and social reality. In turn, it is also “a unifying principle for tangible and social computing.” In this chapter he defines the notion of embodiment (and embodied interactions) by exploring the emergence of this concept.

The Quick Definition of Embodiment:
In this chapter Dourish evolves the definition of embodiment from “embodied phenomena are those that occur in space and time” to “embodiment is the property of our engagement with the world that allows us to make it meaningful.” He also shares a definition for embodied interaction: “[it] is the creation, manipulation and sharing of meaning through an engaged interaction with artifacts.”

In the book you only get to these last two definitions at the end of the chapter, at which point it makes more sense. So if you are confused just read on about the theories underlying this definition.

Emergence of the Concept of Embodiment:
Dourish’s exploration into the emergence of the concept of embodiment focuses mostly on thinkers from the phenomenological tradition, a school of philosophy in which I am personally interested. The perspectives that he highlights share three commonalities in their approach:

1. The concept of embodiment plays a central role in all perspectives. Remember that our definition of embodiment is “a property of our engagement with the world that allows us to make it meaningful.” This definition expands beyond the notion of embodiment as a physical property to encompass non-physical properties that impact our experience of being-in-the-world.
2. Practice plays a central role in all perspectives. By practice, Dourish refers to actions carried out in the world to accomplish “practical goal[s].” Action in the world is considered fundamental to our understanding the world and our relationship with it.
3. All perspectives consider embodied practical action as a source of meaning. Embodiment is a source for intentionality rather than the object of it.

The Evolution of Phenomenology:
Phenomenology is relevant to understanding Dourish’s concept of embodied interaction because it is a school of thought that focuses on “ the behavior of embodied actors going about their business in the world.” It rejects abstract and formalized reasoning in favor of the world of everyday experience. To phenomenologists, meaning is found in the way the world reveals itself to us as being available for our actions, and in the way in which the world acts upon us - in both its physical and social manifestations.

Edmund Husserl is considered the father of phenomenology. The main aim of his investigations was to understand the relationship between objects of intentionality and our consciousness of those objects - in other words, the relationships between the objects of meaning and our experience of those objects. Intentionality is an important concept in phenomenology. I will not go into detail about this concept here because it is explored in detail in the next chapter of the book.

To properly analyze the relationship between these two notions, phenomenologists need to get passed the “natural attitude” under which humans operate that assumes the existence of “perceived objects” or meaning based solely on the perception. Life-world (lebenswelt) is a concept that Husserl introduced to refer to the everyday, mundane world of common background understandings that give rise to the “natural attitude” and provide a context for everyday experiences.

Martin Heidegger was a one of Husserl’s students. He broadened the focus of investigation from purely mental and cognitive concerns to encompass physical considerations, breaking away from Husserl’s perspective that separated mind and body, to embrace a wholistic perspective focused on being. Heidegger believed that first you need “to be in order to think.”

Based on Heidegger’s perspective, the meaningfulness of everyday experience arises from the way we exist in the world rather than from one’s mind – the experience of being cannot be separated from the world in which it occurs. He believed that the way we encounter the world is practical. We encounter it as a place in which we act and as a consequence intentionality (or meaning creation) is a practical affair.

Another important perspective that Heidegger introduced is that the world is not simply an object of our action but also as a medium through which we act. He distinguishes two ways in which we encounter the world: “ready-at-hand” and “present-to-hand.” Present-at-hand refers to when we encounter the world as an object of our action. An example of a ready-at-hand encounter is when we pick up a hammer and are conscious of the way we are holding it in our hand. Ready-to-hand refers to when we encounter the world as a medium through which we act. For example, when we are using a hammer but our consciousness is focused on a task such as hammering a nail

Here is a nice quote from Dourish about Heidegger’s impact on phenomenological thinking: “Essentially, Heidegger transformed the problem of phenomenology from an epistemological question, a question about knowledge, to an ontological question, a question about forms and categories of existence.”

Alfred Schutz extended phenomenology “beyond the individual to encompass the social world.” His main contribution focused on the issue of intersubjectivity. This concept refers to our “intersubjective understandings of the world and of our actions [with]in it.” Intersubjectivity ultimately provides the foundation from which social action emerges and from which social order is constituted.

Schutz’s rejected the traditional sociological perspective, which viewed intersubjectivity as a universal law. To him, intersubjectivity is a phenomena that emerges out of our everyday “mundane” experience - it is a problem that is “routinely solved by social actors in the course of their action and interaction. Social actors are, in effect, practical sociologists, solving the problems of sociology for themselves everyday.” One last important point is that this world of everyday “mundane” experience is the life-world described by Husserl.

Maurice Merlau-Ponty is the phenomenologist that placed the greatest emphasis on the concept of embodiment. The main focus of his investigation was the role that the body played in unifying the duality of mind/body, and subject/object. Embodiment had three different meanings according to Merlau-Ponty.

“The first is the physical embodiment of a human subject, with legs arms, and of certain size and shape; the second is the set of bodily skills and situational responses that we have developed; and the third is the cultural “skills,” abilities, and understanding that we responsively gain from the cultural world in which we are embedded. Each of these aspects, simultaneously, contributes to and conditions the action of the individual, both in terms of how they understand their own (the ‘phenomenological body’) and how it is understood by others (the ‘objective body’).”

Beyond Phenomenology
In this chapter, Dourish also introduces other modern theorists who are not part of the phenomenologist school but who have focused on the physical and social aspects of embodiment.

Being in the Physical World – J.J. Gibson is a proponent of ecological psychology, a branch of psychology that focuses on “knowledge in the world” as opposed to “knowledge in the head.” He introduced the now common concept of affordance, which “is a property of the environment [or an artifact] that affords action to appropriately equipped organisms.” This concept has heavily infiltrated the world of HCI, and it reached the general consciousness via Donald Norman’s book “The Psychology of Everyday Things.”

Being in the Social World – Lucy Suchman drew extensively from Garfinkel’s ethonomethodological perspective, which in essence “claims that everyday social practice creates and sustains the social world by rendering it publicly available and intelligible. Members’ methods for making action accountable are means through which the phenomenon of objective social reality is achieved.” (go back to the chapter 3 summary for more on ethnomethodology). Suchman demonstrated how the regimented models that are embodied in most interactive technology do not properly support the contextual and practical means by which human action is organized.

Language Games and the Meaning of Language - Ludwig Wittgenstein was a philosopher who studied language. He posited that meaning in language does not arise from words themselves but is rather embedded in the practice of language. He saw language as a form of action, rather than a system of symbols with objective meanings. To emphasize his perspective he developed the notion of “language games” that refer to “socially shared linguistic practices ‘consisting of language and the actions into which it is woven.’”

Wrap-up
The goal of this rather long post is to help you understand Dourish’s definition of embodied interaction, with which I began this summary: “[it] is the creation, manipulation and sharing of meaning through an engaged interaction with artifacts.” I hope I have succeeded in doing so, if not, leave a comment and we’ll see if I can help shed any more light on the subject.

Book Summary: Where the Action Is - The Foundations of Embodied Interaction (chapter 3)

Where the Action Is; The Foundations of Embodied Interaction
By Paul Dourish
MIT Press, 2001

Chapter 3 - Social Computing

In this chapter, Dourish explores the ways in which sociological concepts and methods are increasingly being leveraged in the design, development and evaluation of interactive systems. Social computing is defined as the application of sociological understanding to the design of interactive systems. Leveraging a sociological approach to designing interactive systems makes sense because of the context in which computation takes place: first, the work that computation does and the ways we put computation to use are embedded in a fabric of relationships between people, institutions and practices; second, the system mediates a "social" interaction between the designer and the user. This communication is founded on a background of common understandings.

Dourish focuses on two social computing approaches - Technomethodology, and the Locales Framework. These approaches share three common characteristics (in the author's own words):

1. "They are concerned with the details of the organization of social conduct rather than broad social trends.
2. "They are primarily oriented toward real activities and experiences rather than abstractions or models.
3. "They all adopt an anthropological and ethnographical perspective on collecting, interpreting, and using field materials."
   

Before delving into these two social computing paradigms I will provide an overview of several concepts that provide a foundation for these approaches (Ethnography, Ethnomethodology, Abstraction, Space, and Place). Note that the concept definitions provided by Dourish are often more specific than the general definition to which the terms usually refer. I'll do my best to be brief and clear.

Ethnography: ethonography places an emphasis on the detailed understanding of culture through intensive, long-term involvement. Ethnographers explore not only what the members of a culture do, but also what they experience in doing it. In order to achieve this they attempt to avoid their preconceptions to understand and represent the culture from a member's point of view.

The Chicago School introduced an ethnographic approach to studying working practice in the 1950's. This led to the adoption of these types of fieldwork-oriented approaches in Human-Computer Interaction to support the discovery of system requirements and the evaluation of systems in use. Ethnographic approaches focuses on "work practice" rather than "work process." Work process refers to the standardized procedures that mandate how work must be carried out; Work practice refers to the informal practices that people develop to make processes work in the face of everyday contingencies. Practice is always dynamic, whereas processes are static.

An ethnographic approach enables designers to understand how a system can work in the context where it will be put to use, and whether a system is working effectively as embodied by a group of people using the system to do real work in a real setting. Dourish shares two examples that illustrate these benefits, the ethnography of an Air Traffic Control Center and that of a Print Shop (I won't go into details regarding either of them here).

Ethnomethodology: Ethnomethodology focuses on how commonsense methods that people use to manage and organize their every day behavior create orderly social conduct. This approach is in distinct contrast to traditional approaches to sociology that leveraged abstract theories to account for our social reality. The focus of ethnomethodology is investigating the commonsense understandings - these are described as "what everyone knows that everyone knows". These are the understandings by which people make sense of the world and make it available for their actions and activities.

The impact Ethnomethodology had on the world of sociology was to focus the attention on detailed investigation of practice to find within it evidence for the ways that orderly social conduct is achieved. In other words, this concentrates "on the experiences of everyday life rather than on abstract reasoning." Though ethnomethodology is a small strand within sociology, it has had great impact on Human-Computer Interaction (and interaction design).

The concept of "accountability" is central to this school of thought. Accountability refers to the "observable and reportable" nature of actions within a language community (language community refers to any group that shares commonly held understandings - i.e. of doctors, musicians or church-goers). In other words, this means that members within a community can make sense of the action of other members based on the context where the action arises. The concept of accountability is based on the reciprocal relationship between action and understanding - the methods we use for engaging in action are the same methods used for understanding the actions of others.

Abstraction: In Dourish's own words "where abstraction is the gloss that describes how something can be used and what it will do, the implementation is the part under the covers that describes how it will work." Abstraction provides the basis for software systems. On the other hand abstraction also hide the information about how a system is doing what it does (i.e. how the perceived actions are organized). According to the notion of accountability, this information is key to enabling others to understand the actions.

Space & Place: The concept of space serves as a central model and metaphor for our thinking and language. Spatial metaphors are common because they are based on a feature of our physical world that is shared by all human beings. The notion of space is primarily concerned with physical, or metaphorically physical, properties. On the other hand, the concept of place is concerned with social properties.

So while space refers to the configuration of people and artifacts within a setting, place refers to the behavioral framework for a setting that is conveyed by common social understandings.

Technomethodology

This term was developed by Dourish to describe a design perspective that focuses on creating a deeper relationship between ethnomethodology and technological design. It is characterized by the following criteria:

1. "It attempts to draw not simply on a set of observations of a specific working setting, but rather on ethnomethodology's fundamental insights about the organization of action as being a moment-to-moment, naturally occurring, improvisational response to practice problems.
2. "It attempts to relate these understanding not simply to the design of specific interactive system aimed at a specific setting, but rather, at the basic, fundamental principles upon which software systems are developed-ideas such as abstraction, function, substitution, identity, and representation."

The main challenge that Dourish address in regards to technnomethodology is how to reconcile the concepts of abstraction and accountability. To overcome this hurdle, a system needs to exhibit three primary features:

1. The account of the system's behavior is connected to the actual behavior that it describes.
2. The account of the system's behavior emerges from the action itself, it is not as a commentary about the action.
3. The account must be based on the current specific behavior of the system, in its current configuration, carrying this specific task.

Locales Framework

The notion of locale is captured in the concept of place. The Locale's Framework was developed to provide system designers with a practical understanding of the social organization of activity that can be leveraged to impact their designs. This framework is based on five components, called aspects:

1. Foundations: This includes the social world being addressed (community that shares a common action or goal and ability to communicate to establish a collective orientation), the sites (spaces) and means (furnishings) that make up the locale (place).
2. Civic Structure: This is focused on how the local relates to other locales. "In the same way that meaning of action is constituted by other actions that come before and after them, so, too, can locales only be understood in relation to others."
3. Individual Views: This addresses the different perspectives, concerns, roles, and forms of participation provided by the individuals who inhabit the locale.
4. Interaction Trajectories: This refers to the emergence of a specific course of actions evolved through time and involving multiple actors (individuals). This aspect situates actions within particular histories, and, from a broader perspective, creates the notion of the collective action of social worlds.
5. Multuality: This is a tough one to explain, so I'll plagiarize: "aspect refers to the ways in which sites and means are made manifest to members of a social world, and the way in which those members and their actions are made manifest to others through the sites and means."

Book Summary: Where the Action Is - The Foundations of Embodied Interaction (chapters 1, 2)

Where the Action Is; The Foundations of Embodied Interaction
By Paul Dourish
MIT Press, 2001

Overview

In this book Paul Dourish outlines his philosophical perspective on interaction design and HCI. Dourish advocates that designers need to consider the embodied nature of human action (and interaction) when creating systems. His concept of embodied interaction is strongly rooted in the phenomenological approaches of Heiddegger and Merleau-Ponty.

I enjoyed reading this book as it marries my current interests in Interaction Design with Phenomenological philosophy. The book provides an academic and theoretical perspective that was interesting but sometimes hard to follow. Tangible and social computing, two areas of interaction design in which I am very interested, are closely examined through an embodied interaction framework. The broad concepts and principles outlined here are abstract enough to remain relevant for a long time. However, designers looking for practical advice and how-to tips on using current technologies should avoid this title.

What is Embodied Interaction?
Embodied interaction refers not to technology but to the nature of our interaction with the world. “Our actions cannot be separated from the meanings that we and others ascribe to them.” Actions carry meaning that is derived from being embedded in social and physical environments that are laden with meaning. In turn, actions also create meaning that transforms the environments whose meaning originally gave rise to the actions. “Action both produces and draws upon meaning; meaning both gives rises to and arises from action.” This perspective on interactions has important implications for the design of human-computer interfaces.

Chapter 1 – A History of Interaction

In the first chapter, Dourish provides a brief overview of the evolution of computer technology and the history of its adoption by society. He illustrates how the style of human-computer interaction has evolved, and how this change has been crucial for enabling computation to become embedded in so many facets of modern life.

Towards the end of the chapter, Dourish turns his attention to tangible and social computing. These new types of interface enable an “expansion of the range of human skills and abilities that can be incorporated into interaction with computers” . Here Dourish lays out the main thesis of his book and provides a brief overview of its implications. His thesis is that “[tangible and social computing] draw on the same sets of skills and abilities… [and] are arguably aspects of one and the same research program.” This argument has four parts:

• Social and tangible interactions are based on the same underlying principles.
• Embodiment is central to these alternative perspectives on interaction.
• Other schools of thoughts can provide a foundation for understanding embodiment.
• We can build on existing schools of thought to create a foundational approach to embodied interaction that informs and supports design and unites social and tangible interactions into single model of human-computer interaction.

Here is a brief overview of the stages in the development of human-computer interaction as outlined by Dourish. These stages have been defined based on the types of human skills that are required by the user interface:

• Electrical: Analog computers were essentially an “apparatus for laboratory simulations that took place not in the physical world, but an analogous electronic reality.” During this time to set up a new experiment (which would be analogous to running a new application) the computer would have to be completely re-configured, including the incorporation of new circuits – hence the label as an electrical interface. A user would need to have deep understanding of the construction of any given machine in order to operate it. Even when the initial transition was made from “hardware configuration to digitally stored programs [from analog to digital computers] the dominant parading for interaction with the computer was electronic (i.e. machine language). The boundary that we now take for granted between hardware and software was a lot fuzzier”.
• Symbolic: The arrival of symbolic forms of interaction was characterized by the emergence of conventions and well-understood capacities that became available across a wide range of machines – “register files, index registers, accumulators, and so forth”. A detailed understanding of the construction of individual computers was no longer necessary for computer programming. This was the era when computers began to be produced industrially. During this period, programs shifted from being primarily number-based to more symbolic forms that are easier for humans to learn and apply (i.e. assembly languages). Programming systems arose that specified two sets of rules: the first determines the instruction set for a programming language; the second describes how the human-written program can be converted into a set of instructions that the computer can execute (i.e. machine language).
• Textual: Symbolic interaction evolved into textual interaction when the primary means of actual interaction with the computer shifted from punch cards and other symbolic media to keyboards via teletype and video terminals. The textual interactions are structured by a grammar that defines “commands, parameters, arguments, and options.” Human-computer interaction became a loop of “endless back-and-forth… instructions and responses between user and system.” This dialogue was enabled by the new way that interactions were mediated.
• Graphical: Most modern day computer interfaces are based on graphical interactions. The evolution from textual to graphical interactions “did not only replace words with icons, but instead opened up whole new dimensions for interaction-quite literally, in fact, by turning interaction into something that happened in a two-dimensional space rather than a one-dimensional stream of characters.” This evolution enabled users to interact with computers using several additional human abilities, including: peripheral attention; pattern recognition and spatial reasoning; information density; visual metaphors.

The graphical interface paradigm continues to be the most common style of human-computer interaction. However, as I mentioned above it is two other emerging fields of study that are of special interest to Dourish–tangible and social computing. Here is a quick overview of key trends in these areas:

• Tangible: Tangible computing encompasses a wide variety of physical interactions. There are three general trends in research related to tangible computing that Dourish highlights. The first trend is distribution of computation “across a variety of devices, which are spread throughout the physical environment and are sensitive to their location and their proximity to other devices.” The second is augmentation of every day world with computational power to make common physical objects “active entities that respond to their environment and people’s activities.” The last trend is an investigation into how these two types of approaches can be used to create environments where people interact with computation devices via physical artifacts.
• Social: Social computing also encompasses a varied range of activities. There are three main areas of activities that are addressed by Dourish. The first area of investigation is incorporation of social understanding into the design of interactions. Next is the concern is with the application of anthropological and sociological approaches to uncover the “mechanisms through which people organize activity, and the role that social and organizational settings play in this process.” The final area of investigation is how the traditional “single-user” interaction paradigm can be enhanced by the incorporation of information regarding others, and their activities.

Chapter 2 – Getting in Touch

In the second chapter we delve deeper into the world of tangible computing. Here is one of my favorite passages from this chapter, where Dourish explains his perspective on tangible computing: "The essence of tangible computing lies in the way in which it allows computation to be manifest for us in the everyday world; a world that is available for our interpretation, and one which is meaningful for us in the ways in which we can undertand and act in it."

Since tangible computing has only recently become established, Dourish focuses on providing an overview of the important studies from the past decade that have provided the foundation for this field. The main strands of research that are discussed include: ubiquitous computing, which attempts to make computing invisible by embedding it in everyday objects and places; and tangible bits, which attempts to make computing more accessible by enabling humans to interact with digital information via physical media.

I will provide a deeper dive into these two schools research shortly, however, first I want to highlight some common features and issues related to tangible computing systems:

• Multiple centers of interaction: unlike tradional computing systems that have a single or a few centers of interaction, tangible computing has multiple centers of interaction. In traditional systems "Only one window has the 'focus' at any given moment; the cursor is always exactly in one place, and that place defines where my action is carried out." In tangible computing systems, the interaction takes place in the environment distributed across several objects. The coordinated use of various objects is required for the user to accomplish tasks.
• Non-sequential organization of interactions: In traditional computing, the sequential nature of interactions is a consequence of the singular focus of intetractions. This helps to simplify both the user interface and the development of systems. In tangible computing systems, interactions are non-sequential - similar to the way in which we interact with the physical world. And, there is never any way to know how what a user might do next.
• Physical properties are suggestive of use: Like other physical objects, tangible computing artifacts have physical properties that are suggestive of their use. This feature enables designers to create artifacts that can guide users through the process of use - "with each stage leading naturally to the next through the way in which the physical configuration at each moment suggests the appropriate action to take."

Ubiquitous Computing: the term "Ubiquitous Computing" was coined by Mark Weiser while working on a research project at Xerox PARC. The main idea behind this discipline is that "instead of taking work to the computer, why not put computation wherever it is needed." Ubiquitous computing attempts to seamlessly integrate computation into activities of our everyday life by enhancing objects and locations with processing power. "Computers would disappear into the woodwork; computers would be nowhere to be seen, but computation would be everywhere."

Examples of ubiquitous computing research projects include: use of active badges that enable applications to adapt a computationally-embedded environment to specific user needs (computing by the inch); digitally enhanced notepads that enable humans to interact with computers in the way we interact paper (computing by the foot); computer-enhanced desks that enable users to interact seamlessly and interchangeably with paper and digital documents and artifacts (digital desk).

From Ubiquitous Computing to Tangible Bits: Here is the explanation of this evolution in Dourish’s own words – below I’ve included my own interpretation: “[Tangible bits] sees computation within a wider context. Ubiquitous Computing pioneers saw that, in order to support human activity, computation needs to move into the environment in which that activity unfolds… [Tangible bits takes] the next step of considering how computation is to be manifest when it moves into the physical environment, and recognizing that this move makes the physicality of computation central.”

As promised here is my understanding of the differences between these two schools of thought:

• The ubiquitous computing view of the world states that computing will become progressively more invisible once it is embedded into every day objects. This view has a technical/scientific perspective and is based on analytical thinking.
• The tangible bits school of thought acknowledges that computation is being embedded into physical objects but rather than believe that it will become invisible it focuses on how to manifest computation in this new realm - the physical environment. This view has a design perspective that is based on lateral thinking.

Here are three important distinctions that differentiate the perspective of tangible bits from that of ubiquitous computing:

• The design of artifacts in the world of tangible bits reflects a concern with communication. Artifacts are designed to convey information that is important, and are often readable “at-a-glance”. This is in contrast to the “invisibility” of computation under the ubiquitous paradigm.
• The physicality of artifacts based on tangible bits must be designed intentionally; it is not simply a consequence of the design. This is based on “recognition that technology is the world, and so its physicality and its presence is a deeply important part of its nature.”
• In the realm of tangible bits, computation is embedded more directly within physical objects. Whereas even in the realm of ubiquitous computing there is still a seam between physical objects and computation.

Tangible Bits: The term “Tangible Bits” comes from the Tangible Media Group at the MIT Media Lab. Their research is focused on the belief that “while digital and physical media might be informationally equivalent, they are not interactionally equivalent.” Based on this premise, much of their investigation focuses on creating artifacts that support physical manipulation of digital information. By leveraging physical objects to represent information and/or actions we are able create more natural interactions with digital information.