New Now Know How

Ricky writes about a conversation that we had on, among other things, seamful and seamless computing. As ever with this ongoing debate between Ricky and myself, I think we agree on more than it seems we do.

Jumping right in with an example of where we agree more than disagree:

Furthermore, this talk of having computers blending with the natural environment is a complete red herring, designed to draw your attention away from one of the real goals of ubiquitous computing, which is simply to release users from explicit interaction with technology as far as it is possible and sensible to do within certain applications of technology. The extent to which this is possible and the degree to which it remains sensible is determined by the users themselves. [my emphasis]

To which I say — sort of. The extent to which users are able to not explicitly interact with technology rests with designers in that the designer is the person who makes interaction possible (and the converse is also true). The degree to which it is sensible to not explicitly interact with technology is with the user and how they are using the technology in question. I think Ricky is saying (see emphasissed sentence in above quote) that the degree of invisibleness of a technology is a dynamic thing. It’s on a continuum with invisible/implicit at one end and visible/explicit at the other. Ideally, a user is able to negotiate that continuum themselves, being aware of when they are and are not “using” the technology.

Ricky’s example of RFID being a “different kind of visible!” is a good one. As Chalmers & Galani (2004) said:

“underlying infrastructural mechanisms are ‘literally visible, effectively invisible’, in that everyday interaction does not require attention to these mechanisms’ representations–but one can selectively focus on and reveal them when the task is to understand or even change the infrastructure.”

Invisibility or seamlessness is constructed (or, if you like, performed) by the people using a technology. To varying degrees the technology is “literally visible, effectively invisible” because the users make it that way. This happens already. To take a technology for granted is to render it effectively invisible. The many layers between my desktop computer and the internet at large are invisible to me. I can delve into them if I choose but there is typically no need to do so. The same is true of many other taken-for-granted technologies.

Making the transition from invisible to visible might be necessary for a lot of different reasons. Somthing’s broken. Something’s breaking. Something needs re-configuring to make a new thing happen. The thing can be used both implicitly and explicitly and the time has come to make the move. And more besides. It will be possible to design things that are so simple that it is easy to learn to treat them as invisible and never have to render them visible again. However it will also be necessary, as ubiquitous technologies become more sophisticated and begin to do more for us, to be able to shift these technologies into the foreground, or indeed to be able to not treat them as invisible in the first place.

I think that seamlessness and seamfulness are less about whether things are or are not invisible but whether it is possible to make the transition from invisible to visible and back again if the need arises. Depending on the depth of what you want to be (in)visible, this either has very little to do with the actual nuts and bolts (or 1s and 0s) of ubicomp infrastructure or it has everything to do with it.

It’s pretty common among mobile technology geeks to point at how the Japanese use their mobile phones as a view of the future of the mobile in the west. According to anthropologist, Mizuko Ito, that’s not necessarily the case. In a typical example of technological determinism:

In conversations about technology in Japan, the assumption is that there is something inherent in a particular technology that makes it get taken up in a particular way, and it’s not inherently culturally specific. But at the same time, if there is something that seems different from how other countries have taken up a technology, it gets attributed to the cultural strangeness of the Japanese, i.e., if the Japanese don’t use cell phones like people in the U.S. it must be something cultural.

This is the falacious argument that if a technology succeeds then it was something in the technology but if it fails (to replicate successes) then there was something social that caused the failure. Ito says that a better explanation is to look at the “technological trajectory” in each country as a way to explain the differences (and similarities).

The U.S. is an incubator for advanced PC Internet technology, and Japan is at the other end of the spectrum. The reason the Japanese are doing more diverse and cool things with their mobile phones is because they’re depending on them more as their primary information devices. It will continue to be an incubator for interesting mobile technologies, but is certainly not the site were you should look for everything IT.