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The Mundane Computer: Non-Technical Design Challenges Facing Ubiquitous Computing and Ambient IntelligenceAllan ParsonsPage 1 ¦ Page 2 ¦ Page 3 ¦ Page 4 ¦ Page 5 ¦ Printer-friendly version 5. The research agendaIn thinking through the notion of context-awareness, consideration is needed of how contexts bleed: outwards through geo-physical extension; inwards through reflexive intension and intention; and paradoxically, and potentially absurdly, as the outside and inside and the extensive and intensive interpenetrate, creating motivation and purposiveness. The dimensions of our actions vary greatly, depending on context. Context stretches beyond what we are aware of consciously. Our actions may not have the consequences we intend. Our individual performances affect the character of the ensemble of practices to which they contribute, but not in ways that we control. Through context-awareness, ambient intelligent environments might help us to make finer judgements about our actions, so that we may alter them more in line with out intentions, as we begin to understand more fully the (ever-ramifying) implications of what we are doing individually (psycho-dynamically and inter-subjectively), collectively (in the form of institutional regularities) and globally (in the form of aggregate behaviours). Ambient intelligent environments might also help us to identify the potentially absolutising, fascisising or totalitarianising directions of our intentionality, enabling greater self-criticism. Such environments, by helping us to perform definite tasks may enable us to do much more qualitatively or quantitatively, depending on what is more appropriate, given the context of development. If this is the case, development of context-aware computing may indeed be justified. Even so, we still have to remain alert to the potential price of such technological progress in terms of our societal, or 'civilisational', development, our human agency and empowerment, our quality of life and our quality of experience, refusing simply to equate technical progress with economic development, societal development, human development and personal development. Developing such vigilance requires not just criticising ubiquitous computing and ambient intelligence but engaging with them which, in turn, means engaging in collaborative research to consider feasible and desirable directions for development. The design of ubiquitous computing and ambient intelligence needs to address issues relating to interdisciplinary learning and collaboration, consolidation of interdisciplinary learning to create new 'knowledges', the relationships between abstract knowledge and embodied competences, the actual, limited whereabouts of 'everywhere', the immediate aims and the ultimate objectives of ubiquitous computing and ambient intelligence, how and why complex technologies are disseminated and adopted, the process of contextualisation and the processes of socio-historical development, whereby technical change is related to personal development, human development, societal development, economic development and environmental change. The challenge is immense. The following concepts, derived from the existing literature on ubiquitous computing and ambient intelligence, may help us begin to address that challenge and to design specific research projects, but they are far from providing a comprehensive taxonomy. 5.1 Everyday lifeOne way of expressing the overall challenge facing ubiquitous computing and ambient intelligence, as a mixed computer/social paradigm, is to say that an understanding of 'our world', 'the everyday' or 'everyday life' is needed, to facilitate the design and development of effective ambient intelligent environments. The difficulty in creating an understanding of everyday life is not lack of evidence or available approaches but over-abundance of interpretations of the everyday. As Barry Sandywell [33] points out, everyday life is a central, highly diverse and problematic theme for modern philosophy and social theory. The analysis of the everyday has been undertaken by such thinkers as Dilthey, Wittgenstein, Simmel, Husserl, Schutz, Heidegger, Dewey, Lefebvre, Kosik, Bakhtin, Benjamin, Bloch, Habermas, Garfinkel, Debord and de Certeau. There are potentially valuable insights within each interpretation which could contribute to the creation of a set of understandings to aid the design of ubiquitous computing. To combat potential information overload, a practice-centred approach to the everyday is taken in what follows. 5.2 Performative practiceFor Anne Galloway, everyday life is a question of performative practice. Performativity involves spatialisation, temporalisation, embodiment, identification and sociality, the processes by means of which space, time, bodies, identities and socialities, essential to being-in-the-world, are performed. She also notes that ubiquitous computing raises issues relating to power and control in everyday life. Those involved in the development of ubiquitous computing, she states, "need to be clear on, and be able to justify, what it is about the mundane nature of everyday life that can be ‘improved’ through augmentation, amplification or attempts to merge the physical and the virtual - especially if the technologies themselves are expected to become ordinary and pervasive aspects of everyday life." [34] Galloway’s understanding of the everyday is that it is constituted in and through a field of "sociotechnical assemblages", spaces of performative interaction and intersubjectivity. The social and the technical are already interwoven in concrete, located social and cultural practices. Ubiquitous computing intervenes in a field already mediated by existing social practices and their respective technologies. From Galloway, then, we may extract a principle of performative practice, while context is understood in broad terms as a field of socio-technical assemblages. She also raises the concepts of power and control, which can be understood in both social and technical terms. 5.3 Embodied interactionTo develop further understanding of performative practice and sociotechnical assemblages, in the context of the design and evaluation of ubiquitous computing and ambient intelligence, the work of Paul Dourish [35] is valuable. As already mentioned, Dourish identifies two strands of context-aware computing, the one primarily technical and the other emphasising the relations between human-technology interactions and the social settings in which those interactions unfold. He identifies the key idea that ties these two programmes of work together is that of embodied interaction. As Dourish explains it, embodiment is about both what people do in the world and about how those actions accomplish meaningful events, socially and subjectively, and, in turn, are understood by others as being meaningful. This idea is developed from the work of Lucy Suchman [36] which draws on Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology [37], an approach which explains the orderliness of social conduct in terms of the practical achievement of group members continually working to render the whole sensible and interpretable in the course of their everyday actions. For ethnomethodology, social conduct is orderly because people make it so. Thus, investigation of social order involves the careful examination of specific instances of organised action so as to be able to uncover the means by which people produced the rationality that they exhibit. The ethnomethodological perspective suggests that the context in which actions take place is what enables people to find it meaningful. Context, organisational as much as spatial/physical, plays a crucial role in shaping action and in providing people with the means to interpret and understand action. Because the meaning of action is determined interactionally, temporal context is also involved, as actions and utterances gain their meaning and intelligibility from the way in which they figure as part of a larger pattern of activity. For Dourish, taking a lead from phenomenological philosophy and ethnomethodology, the meaning of a technology is not inherent in the technology but arises from how that technology is used. The significance of this for the design of interactive systems is that the designer does not have absolute control, only influence. In turn, this suggests that if the meaning of the use of the technology is, first, in flux, and, second, something that is worked out again and again in each setting, then the technology needs to be able to support this sort of repurposing, and needs to be able to support the communication of meaning through it, within a community of practice. Dourish’s emphasis on embodiment highlights that the design of ambient intelligent environments should not ignore the inter-related bio-physical and psycho-dynamic dimensions of bodies, individually and collectively, in specific spatio-temporal contexts, and should aim to sustain bodily 'health', in its many dimensions. 5.4 Instrumental and symbolic interactionA major conceptual and practical difficulty for context-aware computing is that physical and human contexts, while analytically separable, are inseparable in performative practice and embodied interaction. The example of eating may clarify this point constructively. Steven Shapin [38] points out that eating is an instrumental act, and is understood as such. People eat to fuel the body and foods serve their purpose in supplying the body’s energy needs. However, eating is much more than its bio-energetic function. Food is saturated with culture. Shapin notes that much of the substance of moral and social order is made up by the practices attending the production, preparation and ingestion of food. Thus, foods are clean and unclean or nutritious or non-nutritious. Foods define racial, religious, national, class and cultural identity. Most fundamentally, Shapin continues, eating is a moment of ontological transformation. It is when the not-you, i.e. not rational and not animate at the time of consumption, starts to become you, the rational being which ultimately decides what to consume. Furthermore, the material transformation is simultaneously the possibility of social and moral transformation or the advertisement of the social and moral states to which a person lays claim. For example, a temperate person is one who eats temperately, respect for life is shown by vegetarianism and those of high status eat later than those of low status. Shapin concludes that self-nourishing and self-fashioning, both instances of performative practice, occur at the same time. Such insights can be further developed through symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology, both of which highlight reflexivity, the idea that people’s accounts of everyday behaviour are not only reflexive and self-referring but also socially constitutive of the situations to which they refer [39]. Footnotes33. Sandywell, B. (2004). The myth of everyday life: toward a heterology of the ordinary, Cultural Studies, 18/2-3, pp. 160-180. return 34. Galloway, Intimations of everyday life, op. cit. return 35. Dourish, Seeking a foundation, op. cit.: Dourish, P. (2001b). Where the action is: the foundations of embodied interaction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. return 36. Suchman, L. (1987). Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. return 37. Garfinkel, H. (1967). Studies in Ethnomethodology. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press. return 38. Shapin, S. (2004). The great neurotic art, London Review of Books 26/15, pp.16-18. return 39. Jary, D and Jary, J., eds. (2000). Sociology, 3rd edition. Glasgow: HarperCollins. return | |