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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 5.5 Architectures, practices, institutionsBoth Galloway and Dourish grasp the nettle of context, seeing context as complicating and interweaving physical, spatial, temporal, social, cultural, psychological, organisational and interactional factors. The work of Philip E. Agre [40] can be used to reinforce the insights of Galloway and Dourish, in the context of understanding the interpenetration of the physical and the human and the instrumental and the symbolic for the purpose of designing and developing context-aware computing and ambient intelligent environments. Agre recognises that wireless information services, or technologies of connectivity and continuous presence as he calls them, complicate the analysis of context for the purposes of designing context-aware computing. He points out that such services, for example mobile phones, loosen the traditionally more fixed relationships between institutions and places, i.e. historically accreted complexes of practices and meanings. New technologies of connectivity establish modes of connectivity that are continuous but peripheral. All of a person’s relationships can be constantly present. Divided attention becomes the norm, Agre argues, an insight which evokes Ulrich Beck's concept of hybrid identity, whereby people move freely among multiple identities in a way partly of their own choosing, but which may lead to conflict and confusion. [41] To provide a means for taking such phenomena into consideration in the design of ubiquitous computing, Agre suggests a three-level analysis. The first level is that of architecture (or the built environment). The primary focus is on fixed structures, e.g. buildings, walls, corridors, doors, windows, and so on, but physical objects, such as furniture and appliances, are included if they are confined to a single location. The second level is that of practices. These are ensembles of embodied routines or actions that a particular group or community of people has evolved for performing particular activities in a particular place. Practices can be differentiated by scale (size of participant grouping). At the micro scale, the example Agre suggests is that of the customary greetings and debriefings that a married couple engage in when they arrive home from work. Ways of attending the theatre provide an example of a practice at the macro scale. The third category is that of institutions. These are defined as the persistent structures of human relationships; or, ensembles of roles and rules that constitute these relationships. Examples of institutions include the medical system, the university, marriage, intellectual property, language and religion. Institutions create categorial and interpretive frameworks for practices. Alternatively, it can be said they provide the rules for the game. As can be seen from the examples, institutions, too, can be differentiated by scale. [42] 5.6 Encoding/decoding: structuration, duration and habitusThe important point that Agre makes is that the architectural/designed/built environment 'maps' or encodes the institutional environment, while both provide resources and constraints for practices. By emphasising agency, in the form of practices, and structure, in the form of architectures/institutions, Agre's mode of explanation is evocative of that of Giddens [43], who uses the notion of structuration to discuss the interrelationship of action and structure, locating the capability of actors in the context of structure as medium and outcome of agency and interaction. Giddens' thought may also be useful in developing Agre's concept of practice, allowing it to be seen as a continuous flow of action and cognition in which both structure and agency play a part. In this way, the short-term spatio-temporal duration of practice (durée) can be distinguished from the long-term spatio-temporal duration of institutions, architectures and socio-historical periods (longue durée). Agre's discussion of practice would also benefit from Bourdieu’s [44] notion of habitus. For Bourdieu, the habitus consists of a set of classificatory schemes and ultimate values which are the means by which groups endeavour to impose ways of seeing favourable to their own interests. Such discussion may prove useful in elaborating the play of the visible and the invisible in the everyday, a notion raised by Weiser. The notion of habitus is embedded in a discussion of social class for Bourdieu, and practice for Bourdieu is primarily a matter of the practices of a class or class fraction. Each habitus is set by historical and socially situated conditions and allows new forms and actions, but is far from allowing the creation of unpredictable or unconditioned novelty. Each of these concepts, encoding, structuration, duration and habitus, has a contribution to make to a more adequate understanding of contextualisation, while each of these abstractions would be clarified and developed through a practical research project pursuing the creation of ambient intelligent environments. 5.7 Contextualisation: location, situation, institution and conjunctureAgre, Dourish and Galloway all highlight the importance of social practices, whether understood as performative practice or embodied interaction. Agre highlights the importance of long-running contextual factors, both at the physical/spatial level and the human/social level, in the forms of the built environment and the institutional environment. He also draws attention to the interpenetration of the physical/spatial and the human/social, using the metaphor of mapping. Through this interpenetration, or mutual encoding, specific 'places' or 'contexts', in which social practices are performed, are created, as spatialities and as temporalities, as Galloway has pointed out. For the purposes of creating a research agenda, four categories of context, of which context-awareness may be generated and encoded, are distinguished: the relatively long-term but relatively static context of location (three-dimensional Cartesian or Euclidean spaces or architectures); the relatively short-term but very dynamic, and often-repeated, context of practices, articulated as situations; the relatively long-term, but malleable, context of institutions; and the relatively long-term and relatively slow-moving socio-historical conjunctures (moments or periods of history) they constitute. Much of ubiquitous computing remains at the level of location-awareness, but if it is to operate in ambient intelligent environments, it will begin to encode situational-awareness, institutional-awareness and conjunctural-awareness into its field of operations. Through what Agre calls 'mapping', location-awareness already operates as, for example, institutional-awareness, but does so in a possibly reductionist manner, in as far as architectural change may not keep pace with institutional change: its 'map' or code may not be sufficiently dynamic, causing difficulties for responsive decoding. 5.8 Institutional order and conjuncturesWhile the focus on practice, performativity, embodiment and interaction is vital for understanding the constitution of specific spatio-temporal realities and human identities, they should not be interpreted in a narrow instrumental way, such that the larger-scale and longer-running spatio-temporalities, Galloway's "sociotechnical assemblages", become obscured. [45] To develop this idea from Agre's scheme, institutions/architectures relate to one another at the level of the institutions themselves, as well as through transfers brought about by individuals' behaviours in crossing institutional boundaries. For example, the theatre relates to other cultural institutions such as the art gallery, the museum and the cinema both as complementary (from the point of view of education and culture) and as competitive (from the point of view of audience attention, revenues and societal resource allocation). The theatre also relates to other forms of institution, for example financial institutions, political institutions, institutions related to industrial, service and agricultural economies, and sporting institutions. Overall, the complex patchwork of inter-relationships of institutions among themselves forms an institutional order, through which power, influence and control are channelled in large-scale, mass societies. This macro-social dimension, the conjunctural, societal whole which orients institutions, gives them their particular, but relative, socio-cultural role, and constrains their freedom to realise their institutional goals. Embodied, performative social practices, through structuration, hold together locations, situations, institutions and conjunctures, as well as the human inter-subjectivities that inhabit them. The conjunctural is a distinct level of regulations and rules, dominated in developed societies by the legislative and organisational forms of the nation-state and, in Europe, by the supranational and intergovernmental forms of the European Union. 5.9 Context-awareness revisitedA context-aware computing, then, could be oriented in a number of ways. For example, it could be location-centred, as in the initial ubiquitous computing experiments, so that an enhanced sense of physical space and ambient physical parameters is achieved. Alternatively, context-aware computing could be situation-centred, focusing on the dimensions of embodied, situated, performative practice. Within situation-centred context-aware computing, it could be task-centred, helping someone to perform a specific task better or quicker; it could be role-centred, helping a person or a group negotiate their organisational roles better; it could be identity-centred, helping a person or a group sustain and develop better their sense of individual or group identity; or it could be centred on intersubjectivity, helping people to understand how to coordinate better the different institutional roles they are expected to play, such as mother, daughter, manager, campaigner, mentor, trainer, friend, etc., in order to develop appropriate behaviours and coping strategies. Context-aware computing could be institution-centred, focusing on the role-stresses that indicate a need for institutional reform. Alternatively, context-aware computing could be conjuncture-centred, focusing on helping a national society organise and change its institutions, their inter-relationships and its resource allocation among them, or helping international society articulate, understand and deal with its problems and tensions. Even more ambitiously, context-aware computing might enable the emergence of reflexive global community, encouraging a more deliberative approach to the tensions over resource use and allocation in a very unevenly developed global socio-economic system. Footnotes40. Agre, P. E. (1997). Computation and human experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Agre, P. E. (2001). Changing places: contexts of awareness in computing, Human-Computer Interaction, 16/2,3-4, pp.177-192. return 41. Beck, U. (2000). What is globalization?. Cambridge: Polity. return 42. Mantzavinos, C. (2001). Individuals, Institutions, and Markets. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. return 43. Giddens, A. (1984). The constitution of society: outline of the theory of structuration. Cambridge: Polity. return 44. Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. return 45. Clague, C. (1998). Economics, institutions, and economic development, in Institutions and social order, Soltan, K., Uslaner, E. M. and Haufler, V., eds.. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. return | |