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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 5.10 Conjuncture: repetition, reproduction, change and developmentConjunctures do not develop according to a single logic, but through the interplay of the specific logics or rationalities of particular social practices, working through the longer-running socio-historical spatio-temporal realities. These notions can be pursued through further consideration of 'Europe' in the post-Cold War, post-11 September 2001 conjuncture. Europe, Rodrigues argues [46], is going through a transition towards a knowledge-based society. The traditional places, the encoded institutional/architectural/practical spaces, of the 20th century, such as the home, the factory, the office, the school, the street and the city centre, create strong expectations about the structure of activity (tasks and social practices) and the ensemble of roles and attributions. Those strong expectations often foreclosed options that are now opening up, in an era of technologies of continuous presence. However, those expectations made life simpler. Life is going to be more complicated henceforth, Agre [47] concludes (contra Weiser), and a central task for design, including the design of the devices for ubiquitous computing and ambient intelligent environments, will be to make sense of it. The expectations associated with the traditional places made sense of the patterns of everyday interaction, of life style as a pattern of daily, weekly, monthly and annual cycles and intersecting patterns of routine and activity, a framework within which and against which one may act spontaneously. Expectations set limits. They also made sense of interaction over the life course, for particular generations. Both of these sets of social and temporal expectations, concerning life style and life course, are undergoing change, or rather continue to undergo change, as they have done since the advent of industrialisation, urbanisation and societal and cultural modernisation in the 18th century. The familiar patterns, expectations, roles and ensembles prevailing in the latter half of the 20th century no longer suffice. Indeed, they were contested throughout that period, as manifested in the social movements that marked the era, for example focused on ethnic relations and civil rights, women and gender roles, decolonisation, ecology and the natural environment, sexual orientation, as well as the changing forms of the long-running class politics developed around proletarianisation, industrialisation and internationalisation. Issues related to changing life styles and life course are already being discussed explicitly at the level of the European Union. In European Union countries, from different perspectives, both employers and employees are seeking more flexibility, and governments are seeking to mediate between these two kinds of flexibility to create a new European social model. For example, a report by the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions (EFILWC) states that, "The traditional working life course in Europe is changing. Up to very recently, a standardised working life course existed for men. This included more than 40 years of continuous employment often with only one employer, and with distinct education and retirement phases. Learning, employment, and paid retirement after working were three sequential life phases." As the report indicates, the working life course for women was somewhat different, "interrupted by longer periods of care and household work, leading either to a complete and permanent exit from the labour market or to continuous or discontinuous part-time work. Permanent full-time work for women was an exception and women retired earlier. In common with men, however, there were very separate periods of education and retirement." [48] Since 2001, with encouragement from the European Commission's Director General for Employment and Social Affairs, a rethinking has been underway about the way in which periods of work, leisure, learning, and caring are distributed over the life course. Some employees are confronted with time stress. Many have difficulty marrying social and personal needs (care, lifelong learning, voluntary activities, unpaid housework) with demands from employers for more flexibility. At the same time, important groups of employees request greater flexibility in the workplace in order to gain more control over time use and their quality of life. This double flexibility agenda, with demands for flexibility from both employers and employees, over the working life course creates an important challenge for both sides of the labour market. Employees are also confronted with a gap between more flexible working time and employment arrangements and traditional social security provisions, which are based on the standard male model of continuous working life course. This creates serious disadvantages for the flexible workforce and represents a policy challenge to modernise relevant social security provisions. To respond efficiently to rapid economic and technological change, companies must adapt. Working time arrangements which improve the employability, productivity, and adaptability of the labour force play an increasingly important role in company strategy. Volatile markets have resulted in a demand for more flexible working time arrangements. At the same time, high investment costs have accelerated demand for working time arrangements which allow longer operating hours, resulting in an increase in unsocial working hours. Nonetheless, an increased labour supply, via better work-life balance or later retirement, is welcomed by employers, to avoid skill shortages and to control labour costs. In general, by improving the feedback systems between natural ecosystems and socio-economic ecosystems and within socio-economic systems, both of which imply institutional rearticulation, particularly of those institutions organised around the (new and more traditional) media technologies of mass communication, society as a whole (understood as a set of communities of different scales and organisation) might be turned towards more sustainable directions. To be realised, these macro-social, potential and relatively abstract benefits (effectively at the level of socio-historical conjuncture) will have to be translated into concrete, situated social practices. It is therefore vital that a bottom-up or micro-social approach (focusing on the located, the situated and the communal, whether of place or of interest) balances a top-down, macro-social approach. The actual resolution of what transpires will depend on relative power and the lines of communication or dislocation within and between these two domains, the macro- and the micro-social. A key issue in the translation of the potential into the actual is that of public acceptance and participation. 5.11 Developmental, critical and reflexive futuresSince ambient intelligence "is more a vision of the future than a reality" [49], it is appropriate to address it using the resources of futures studies, but of a critical variety, with its concern for how change occurs, the interplay of multiple factors, alternative futures, complexity and future-oriented learning, leading towards the kind of anticipatory action learning that may be necessary to engage in the design of ambient intelligent environments. [50] As Punie indicates, the vision of ambient intelligence rests on technological progress in the fields of microelectronics, communication networks and interfaces, but it is also driven by socio-economic factors that go beyond the technological. Critical futures studies highlights the role of expectations in those socio-economic factors, articulated in rational discourses. In as far as critical futures studies deals with forecasts or predictions, it is to discuss how they relate to various forms of conventionalised or rationalised expectations, by arguing that an epistemology of forecasting or prediction is anchored in social epistemology. [51] Critical futures studies recognizes the possibility of foresight, at the macro-social, communal and individual levels, but acknowledges the difficulty of achieving it, as well as the absence of guarantees that it has been achieved [52]. It also recognises the difficulties inherent in public administration-led national foresight exercises. [53] Visioning is part of futures studies, as is examining the assumptions, expectations and justifications for what is envisioned, addressing the issues raised by, for example, Araya [54] in respect of what kind of social and technological visions ubiquitous computing and ambient intelligence represent. In line with the focus on performative, embodied interaction, developed through the work of Agre, Dourish and Galloway, futures studies can accommodate questions that are epistemological, ontological, sociological, and technological at once through its concern with the dynamics of change. Futures, prospective contexts, are a dimension of the process of contextualization which arises in and through performative, embodied interaction, and which can be easily neglected. Futures represent horizons towards which embodied, performative interactions, which are always in and of the present, are oriented. Futures studies makes explicit the directedness of performative, embodied interaction and the structures of expectations and rationalities by means of which that orientation is maintained, while also demonstrating that actual outcomes may be unintended and potentially absurd. 5.12 Futures, narratives, discoursesThrough scenarios, futures studies can be used to explore narratives or logics of development or prospective achievement, for example as technological progress, societal modernisation and economic growth, as a means for discussing complexity and critically examining the justifications being offered for specific changes. Futures studies, applied to a recognition that contextualization arises through performative, embodied interaction, can be used to create an understanding of the different temporalities of locations, situations, institutions and conjunctures and the ways in which these different temporalities are intertwined. While it could be said that futures studies is marked by a concern for the long term, it may be more accurate to say that it is marked by a concern for temporalities, their plurality and their interrelationships, some of which are long term. Finally, critical futures studies is marked by a concern for the subjective orientation towards the future. Subjective identities are sustained by narratives of self and by structures of expectations, by means of which the unknown and unknowable are made into terrains that can be traversed. Such identities, subjective orientations and narratives are negotiated and sustained through the embodied interactions of social practice, including those of language-based discursive practices. It is here that futures studies meets cultural studies, as such identities, narratives and patterns of intersubjective interaction are socio-cultural constructs, circulated by means of material cultural artefacts, which constitute enabling technologies and communication technologies. For critical futures studies, ambient intelligence is a possible future for Europe, a socio-technical and environmental vision in which: "users are surrounded by intelligent interfaces supported by computing and technology everywhere, embedded in clothes, furniture, walls, vehicles, processes etc. The environment becomes aware of who – or what – is present and reacts accordingly. The whole body is used for interaction: speech, gestures and even direction of glances. In effect, the environment becomes the interface." [55] The central question is what its realisation might involve. 6. ConclusionUbiquitous computing, ambient intelligence and context-aware computing are visions of prospective sociotechnical and environmental futures. The possibility, plausibility, probability and desirability of those visions need to be considered. This can only be achieved, as Weiser suggested, through an extended, collaborative, future-oriented, action learning cycle, the innovation process, elements of which are outlined above. [56] Footnotes46. Rodrigues, European Policies, op. cit. return 47. Agre, Changing Places, op. cit. return 48. EFILWC, (2003). A new organisation of time over working life: Summary. Dublin: European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions (EFILWC). The full report may be found online at http://www.eurofound.eu.int/publications/files/EF0336EN.pdf. Accessed 31 March 2005. return 49. Punie, Ambient intelligence in everyday life, op. cit. return 50. Inayatullah, S. (2002). Reductionism or layered complexity? The future of futures studies. Futures, 34/3-4, pp.295-302.: Stevenson, T. (2002). Anticipatory action learning: conversations about the future. Futures, 34/5, pp.417-425.: Knyazeva, H. and Kurdyumov, S. P. (2001). Nonlinear synthesis and co-evolution of complex systems, World Futures, 57/3, pp.239-261. return 51. Slaughter, R. A. (2001). Knowledge creation, futures methodologies and the integral agenda. Foresight, 3/5), pp.407-418.: Aligica, P. D. (2003). Prediction, explanation and the epistemology of futures studies. Futures, 35/10, pp.1027-1040. return 52. Slaughter, R. A. (1996). From individual to social capacity. Futures, 28/8, pp.751-762.: Hideg, E. (2002). Implications of two new paradigms for futures studies, Futures 34/3-4, pp.283-294. return 53. Gavigan, J. P. and Scapolo, F. (1999). Matching methods to the mission: a comparison of national foresight exercises, Foresight 1/6, pp.495-517.: Georghiou, L. (1996). The UK Technology Foresight Programme, Futures 28/4, pp.359-377. return 54. Araya, Questioning Ubiquitous Computing, op. cit. return 55. ITEA, Technology roadmap, op. cit. return 56. Lewis, A. V. (1999). Whither engineering? – thinking for the future. BT Technology Journal, 17/1, pp.15-23. return | |