Impressions and Remarks
_Ubiquitous computing (UC) in the computer-science community is obviously focussed on aspects of novelty, espescially if compared to already existing research done in in distributed systems, CSCW etc. Thus, the area of UC is reduced to the questions and solutions of certain UC-systems. But, from the viewpoint of design (and I suppose also social sciences) a main interest lies on UC as THE overall-concept in terms of man-machine-interaction. UC brings in the notion of everyday‘s things (enriched with comutational and sensoral power) as machine (in terms of MMI). (Maybe we should therefore speak of MTI instead of MMI: what about Man-Thing-Interaction?)
UC has - beside it‘s technical aspects - to be considered as a social concept, as a kind of meta-concept for the behaviour of digital systems and the experinces we are facing. In my considerations, UC implies all the aspects of - as Peter Lunenfeld calls it - today‘s „digital“ era. UC can be divised in many UC-systems (so do pragmatically most of the programmers) and they can be considered on their own. But the central question of ubiquity is linked to a perception of UC as an entity.
_Many of the lectures referred to the importance of connecting the physical (i.e. real) and the digital (virtual) world. Anind Dey e.g. showed his group‘s experiences with ambient interfaces. They had a special purpose - to display day & night in a room without windows; to communicate the next arrivals of the bus - but haven‘t been really accepted and failed. Why? Obviously the artefacts were not really interesting enough - in terms of techniques, aesthetics, whatever. But probably the concept was not strong enough - the transfer from input signal to output signal (i.e- ambient interface) was to linear, to direct, to abstract, not poetic enough... The idea behind the presented examples was to build an ambient interface, not to create a certain experience, I suppose. A simple webcam would have done the same job, probably more efficiently.
And here comes the discipline of design (and maybe the new media arts) in: dealing with aspects of aestehtics and perception, HCI, user experience, 2d and 3d communication, artefacts etc. - with mediation. Not very surprising: many of the samples presented as innovative and good ambient interfaces came from designers and media artist: Bishops Marble Answering machine was, as far as I know, a thesis at RCA in 1992 and artist Natalie Jeremijenko did Live Wire when being artist-in-residence at PARC.
In Dagstuhl, I was the only Designer amongst the over sixty participants and lecturers. It is quite obvious: the communities aren‘t linked at all or - as only 50% of the appliants could participate to the summer school – haven‘t been regarded as important players...
Friedemann Mattern showed a slide in one of his presentations, where the „convergency“ and the linking of digital and physical world was represented. Mattern pointed out, that the computer scientist have the knowledge of the digital world - and implied that they therefore should take care for the real world... But if 50% of UC is digital-world and the other 50% is real world, where have the guys from the real world been?
UC currently is a domain of the computer sciences; other diosciplines are barely involved.
_At one of the last evening‘s of the symposium, I had a talk with Yves Punie, one of fiew also participating social scientists. (And, thus, not to far away from my interests and concerns...) As a resume, he pointed out, that he was positively surprised by the notion of social issues and the awareness for aspects in the relationship between man and machine. And the people were honestly interessted in these quetions. But as soon as beeing back in daily work - tourist guides, tracking systems, OS for mobile devices, whatever – they will forget about that.
The focus in CS-Research is novelty. A tracking system which is more precise and not described yet is more worth for Your academic career than e.g. a (technically) rather simple load-seonsoring system focussing on HCI and User Experience.


Links

» Notes from the lectures [ PDF-File, 27 pages, 720 KB ]
» Slides: "designing ubicomp – the mutual influences of ubiquitous computing and design. A short outline on a phd-project." [ PDF-File, 14 pages, 276 KB ]

» Website of the UC Summer School with links to