Seamless Computing Notes

Before I start my presentation I’d like to begin my reassuring you that although I’m
(currently) an academic I’m not going to send you to sleep or to test you at the end of the
session to determine just how much you’ve managed to learn from my talk.

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Up until 9 years ago I left my role as Director of Digital Media at branding consultancy
Design Bridge, I had worked as the design and production lead on a number of 6-figure
projects at IBM, Telstar, Granada Media and was involved in a number of digital start-ups.

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Now I work as Associate Dean for a specialist arts University based in Kent and Surrey –
University for the Creative Arts, where I share my design and business insights with
Undergrads and Postgrads (but more about that later).

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I’ve just completed my PhD at the Digital World Research Centre at the University of Surrey
– a research centre led by Professor David Frohlich formerly of Hewlett Packard – which is
engaged in a number of private and publicly funded projects that aim to develop digital and
interactive ideas into possible products.

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The Digital World Research Centre is a multi-discipline team – with an emphasis on design,
technology, business and social science.

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You can visit dwrc.surrey.ac.uk for more info.

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So…onto the main topic of my talk. Living and working in a digital-DIY world.
I’m going to share a number of ideas with you which I think might help us to design
products and services of the future with an ‘informed’ understanding of what people need,
want and can use.

These are ideas that are emergent from the social sciences – not from the world of design
where I come from – and you can use them or refuse them as much as you like. But I
believe that the ideas that I am going to share with you can help us design more effectively
for living and working in a digital-DIY world.

(PAUSE)

Now…When I reflect on the kind of video that we have just seen I wonder…

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…how we’ll ever end up moving towards a vision of augmented, gestural computing that is
simply ‘there’. This is an image, taken 5 years ago, when I moved into an apartment – of the
wires and technology that I needed to setup in the lounge. It is an image that I believe
paints a slightly more realistic picture of the everyday challenges of living and working with
technology – manuals, cables, ports, old technologies and new.

Now. Around the time that I first started to engage with interactive technologies at IBM (as
a designer and co-inventor), another vision of the future was emerging from Xerox PARC.
This vision was shared in an article published in Scientific American way back in 1991. This
article started with the words…

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The article was written by Mark Weiser, a researcher at PARC who had led the creation of
the so-called Ubiquitous Computing lab, and the article and this opening paragraph in
particular seems to serve I think as an antecedent to the video we were watching a
moment ago.

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The ubiquitous computing future laid out in the article – and this is an image from the
article taken at PARC – a technological space that included tablet devices, whiteboards, and
smaller palm-based computing devices and location-sensitive ID badges.

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And all of things were to be wirelessly linked together – connecting servers to printers to
handheld devices.

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And this vision of the future – bearing in mind that the technologies for wireless
communication and the computational chips had yet to be developed – soon became the
so-called ‘ubicomp’ paradigm which has fuelled much subsequent research across Europe
and the US.

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Later in 1994, Weiser laid out what he saw were the unique features of ubicomp research:
this mainly computer science-led initiative was to focus a lot more on insights from the
social sciences; a focus on making the PC ‘invisible’; many many displays; but with casual,
what he called ‘low intensity’ computer use – what he later called ‘calm computing’ by
which things would just happen in the background.

Whilst the intentions are good -

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…the realities are quite different. Computing and information systems do not just come
ready-assembled as complete ensembles….(and this photo taken of the home of a tech
enthusiast is perhaps an extreme version of this). People build their own computing
environments….whether they are semi-experts….

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….or home novices…..

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….all sorts of computing devices, with different (though sometimes duplicate functions)
enter home and work use. Quite often connected only in limited ways – requiring the home
PC as an essential hub to activity.

So…the seamless, calm computing environment promoted early on by Xerox and now by
Microsoft is, in actual fact, a rather seamful and less-than calm experience. ‘Things’ require
rather a lot more of our attention than Weiser imagined approximately 21 years ago.

Given that the everyday realities of living with technology are more problematic than the
visions emergent from research labs, how can we begin to design for seamless computer
living? Ubicomp never foresaw the proliferation in both devices and media channels that
we see today. How can we start to think about designing for new technologies when there
are so many other devices and channels of content and communication already existing?
How can we design for the future whilst acknowledging the present?

I’m going to share with you some ideas that I have…

At around the same time that computer scientists were engaging with the social sciences,
cultural and social science researchers - in Europe (one in Norway and one in the UK) -
started to explore the world of information and communication technology. Three
researchers published work in a book exploring the so-called domestication of technology.
Roger Silverstone, Eric Hirsch and David Morley….

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…..published a chapter on ICTs and (what they called) the moral economy of the household.
This marked out the territory of a theory on how people domesticate technologies into
their everyday lives.

They saw the home as both a moral economy – in which individuals values, aesthetics and
cognitions within the home were negotiated between householders – and a meaningful
economy insofar as the home serves as the economic hub of exchanged things both within
and outside the home.

To connect this idea to technological artefacts…..Silverstone and colleagues developed
what they called…..

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…the transactional phases of the moral economy of the household.
Originally developed with four stages (Appropriation onwards) in a later collaboration
between Les Haddon and Roger Silverstone, the four turned into 6 stages. Imagination,
Commodification, Appropriation, Objectification, Incorporation and Conversion.

And I’ll explain them briefly and why they might help us understand why and how certain
technologies do or don’t enter our lives at home and at work (European researchers have
subsequently applied it to studies of how SMEs ‘domesticate’ technologies into their
businesses).

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At home it is about consumers imaginations of how they want to live their lives, aesthetic
ideals and values

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Technologies emerge out of factories and onto the (real or virtual) shelves
Individuals start to see and identify with them as commodities that they would like.

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An obvious one – the point at which things are bought or exchanged or gifted and become
owned (either temporarily or – as through work – contractually).

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Objectification marks the point at which individuals decide where and how the technology
is going to be placed in the home and how it ‘fits in’ with what is at home.

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Incorporation really marks the point at which technologies are embedded into the routines
of everyday life. Both individual and collective.

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Conversion is the stage at which we can readily accept that a technology or invention is
widely part of public and private life. Text messaging is an example – as are MP3 players
and, increasingly, smartphones.

So that explains the idea of the transactional phases of the moral economy of the
household – of the process of domestication.

But how does this relate to lived experiences? People, of course, don’t recognise this
framework quite so explicitly….but researchers thinking of the moral economy and how
people domesticate technologies are aware of it…

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For instance (and I’m going to show you some insights from my own research), here, a
householder is designing and imagining where her new flat screen TV will go, even before
she has the money to buy one

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Here we see how people’s attachment to particular romantic technologies of the past have
fuelled the imagination for future purchases – here Annabel’s phone is one bought for her
by her husband as it reminds Annabel of her life at home with her parents.

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Here, a particular aesthetic sensibility determines the where the home TV, wireless router,
music player and games console will go.

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And interestingly, when it comes to morals and values, branding plays an important role –
as a ‘semiotic handle’ or a shortcut allowing individuals to make decisions about
technologies to buy and from where to buy them: branding includes aspect such as
Warranties; design; quality; expectation

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And there are other ways that thinking of the moral economy and the transactional phases
are helpful when we consider how the inside of the home is connected to the outside
world in terms of influencing the choices people make about what hardware and software
to use and buy. People seldom make decisions alone….

Thinking of the moral economy and these transactional phases can be helpful….

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But…the problem with the ad-hoc nature of how things come into the home is that they
come into everyday life at varying speeds and at various points in the lifespan of individuals,
households and companies.

Technologies are always at various stages of the domestication process. There is very little
stability for very long.

For instance, as with this case – technologies become redundant – and a question mark
remains about where to put them – chuck them? Or pass them on? Or keep them for use
later?

Furthermore, when Silverstone and colleagues developed the concept of domestication,
there were fewer devices in the home than there are today.

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Here in one house, numerous palm computing devices, digital cameras and PC peripherals
are left in “Sisters garage”.

Keeping track of each and every piece of technology that we own – and I’ve only focussed
on the material ones – is potentially a pretty thankless and data-heavy task. It may be a
better idea to use the idea of domestication as a way of focussing design or user studies –
to think of ways of how we can design products and services in such a way that improves a
particular technology’s journey through life.

I’m not sure that simply ‘logging’ this journey for all the tech we have at our disposal is
going to teach us anything.

I think there are ways we can build on the domestication approach – by introducing two
other heuristic tools

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If instead we think of the ecologies and practices that newly designed technologies come
into, we can better prepare our users and our innovations for the messiness of everyday
life.

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When I refer to ecology I borrow a way of thinking in respect to human interaction with the
resources available to us on the planet. We might not forage distant lands for silica directly,
but we share that drive and desire to appropriate, develop and consume material and
information resources to help us survive in a digital world.

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The home and tech ecology therefore consists of:

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Silent intermediaries (Latour, 2005): USB cables, power adapters, SD cards

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More mundane aspects of ecology like desks, filing cabinets – other non-technological
artefacts

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Infrastructures like power & wireless Internet

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Home (and work) are defined by physical boundaries created by the architecture of home
and work: doorways, walls/privacy and control

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Sofas become barricades to work technology

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People like to mark out and distinguish their territory by “making it their own”.

These are aspects to the ecology of home and work that influence how technology is used
or not used.

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Now lets think about Practices. Now I’ve called this living with technology in everyday life
digital-DIY practice – because in the consumer-led world of interactive technologies we are
quite often left with the task of ‘doing it ourselves’ or quite often with others too. I use it
merely as a way of highlighting just how much personal effort is involved in the setting up,
configuring, reinstalling, fixing and using software and hardware. Maintaining the ecology
of things in the home requires practical activity.

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There are a number of conceptions of ‘practice’ emergent from the social sciences, but I
refer to Reckwitz’s socio-theoretical terms to describe the constituents of practice.

I’m going to describe each of these in turn.

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We lift things into place. We screw them together. We use gestures when using our ipads –
we stand or sit in particular ways.

Using technologies is an embodied activity – even with software – for we use our bodies
somehow (at least currently) to get them to work. (We certainly use our bodies when
things go wrong – in anger or frustration).

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There are mental processes at work as people evaluate the objects, manuals and interfaces
to solve problems. They have a mental picture in their minds about how best to do
something with tech – tapping into this mental mapping offers opportunities for designers.
Here, is an account of how a very rational individual perceives the world around him. He
sees people in the workplace in terms of ‘systems’ in the same way that he thinks through
technologies. He grew up taking things apart – radios, video players – and sees the world in
this way. But of course, not everyone thinks in such a way..

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Things are, of course, at the centre of many practices….and the physical and virtual
affordances of technologies inhibit or support meaningful interaction.

Mouse mats, styluses and screen cleaners are as equally important as tablets, monitors and
keyboards.

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We rely on different forms of knowledge coming from differing sources.

Here is an image that one of my respondents in my study drew showing the people who
have helped the purchase and setup of home technologies - on networks of warm, local or
professional experts

We also grow up with technologies and our acceptance or discomfort with setup and use is
built on the ‘confidence foundation’ in early years. Biographical knowledge.

Also tacit knowledge – learning through doing. When we set things up, users often use trial
and error and get an enormous amount of satisfaction from these.

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The way that people describe what they do with tech – and how people describe them. In
my studies people have various ways of describing what they do which don’t always
coincide with how technicians or developers conceive them.

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The everyday language can be particularly emotive – it expresses the real pain and effort of
trying to get something to work when it clearly won’t work.

Likewise, unfortunately, at least from my studies, gender differences still pervade – men
thought of as geeky or nerdy – responsible for hardware – whilst women responsible for
software and content.

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Another aspect to digital-DIY and indeed all practices of everyday life are structures/and
processes: the processes that include the accepted ways of doing things – rules,
regulations, policies, etiquette. We’re confronted by situations in everyday life, particularly
with technology, that disrupt our regular working structures and practices. Living and
working with tech challenges these social structures.. For instance, at home if the internet
connection is down, it prevents individuals from productively engaging with (for instance)
school newsletter writing or working at home. Or..if it’s the TV signal, it disrupts children’s
scheduled TV activity.

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Reckwitz sees individuals as crossing points of a number of practices. When we think of just
how many practices of everyday life individuals are engaged in, this helps us think about
the kind of tools that can better support living and using technology – we spend increasing
amounts of time on digital-DIY practice – managing photos, configuring software,
downloading apps – whilst we try strike the right balance between eating, sleeping,
watching and .just plain relaxing.

These then, are the constituents of practice. They are the constituents, according to
Reckwitz of all forms of practice – whether it is football, music or (in my case) maintaining
the ecology of technologies.

And this last idea – of individuals as unique crossing points of practice leads me into the
concluding part of my presentation in which I explore some of these crossing points…

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I’m going to talk you through a couple of three real-life examples of how the boundaries of
working at home and living at work are problematic, through this idea of the practice of
digital living. (or digital-DIY)

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Isobel: Works less than a mile from work. She has a laptop which she can take home in
severe weather when the office is shut.
Takes it home 4 times trying to use on home wireless.
Work IT don’t understand why it wont work until they explore the wireless protocol she
uses at home.
She has to change it from WEP to WPS…meaning she has to configure *all* her devices –
including the Internet TV, desktop Mac, iPad, iPhones and home laptop
She relies on her boyfriend to help her set it all up….. knowledge flows!

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Richard uses a colour printer at home with his work laptop. He doesn’t have administrator
rights.
He tries to install the printer driver but cant.
He takes his laptop in to install the driver.
But IT tells him they need the printer to install it correctly.
He has to go home, unplug the computer and carry it all into work….where they install the
printer driver and test the printer.

And finally……an example from my own employer….

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19 of us Deans and Associate Deans work across a number of campuses at UCA. We have 5
campuses – with the distance between Farnham in the West to Canterbury in the East of 94
miles. Which means a meeting in Canterbury requires 188 mile round trip.
We use video conferencing, but often the face-to-face demand of formal committees
means that we can’t always use technology. In a business that relies on the quality of the
interaction between researchers, students and lecturers – and indeed partly down to the
material nature of their work – human-to-human interaction unmediated by technology is
essential.

We reflected on this travelling recently at our Farnham & Epsom campus, where we
discussed what this means.

What we discover is that our homes….

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…have become staging posts for all of the material things – files, documents, DVDs,
designed pieces of work…..

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…books …which we use regularly in teaching or research….all these things are filling and
cluttering up our homes.

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Some of the tech savvy amongst us use cloud apps like Evernote or Alfresco, where we can
share notes, or official University documents……

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….but our briefcases are bulging at the seams despite all of this.

Here is my case – that has fewer printed papers for meetings but more specialist books not
available online. I carry two mobile phones because the primarily publicly funded
institution wants me to have responsibility for the H&S of an entire campus and expects me
to be always available. In one section of my case…I have power adapters, cables disk drives
for all eventualities.

I don’t have seamless computing – but broken seams on my briefcase.

These are the everyday problems that are thrown up by the everyday practices of many
employees in our multi-campus University.

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I hope these real-life examples highlight the challenge of seamless or calm computing that
we saw in the video and in Weiser’s ubicomp vision back in the late 80’s and early 90’s.

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Designing for the messiness of everyday life – for working at home and living at work –
should perhaps be the real goal of these visions of augmented, ubiquitous computing.

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Hopefully if we think of the process of domestication, the wide ecology of ‘things’ that we
live with and the complexity and number of practices in everyday life we might – just might
– design for a better world.

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