Organized by Nicolas Nova, Julian Bleecker and Fabien Girardin
The integration of information processing into everyday objects and our environments, often referred to as "Ubiquitous Computing" has been fueled by strong visions such as Weiser’s ‘Calm Computing’ paradigm or Philips’ ‘Ambient Intelligence’. Nevertheless, the ever-increasing number of smart houses, intelligent assistants or mobile location-based applications find niches but has not yet lead to their adoptions by quotidian users. As stated by researchers such as Bell and Dourish, these visions might mislead us into an infinitely postponed proximate future that eventually distracts our attention to what is currently being used and its effects.
In response, we seek to critically interrogate failures of ubiquitous computing projects that prevented the user-adoption of these technologies. One aspect of this that would be interesting to consider would be the parameters of "failure" – failed product because markets won't support it? failed interaction because the design is off or wrong? Is it because of the vision and the assumptions of ubicomp? Do the failure relate to the perpetuation of wrong ideas? Is it a matter of scale? And back to this notion of ubicomp as a proximate scenario, perhaps we do need those endlessly delayed future visions to advance, a sort of carrot-and-stick that provides a vision of possible futures to inspire and provide context for imagining near future worlds.?
We propose to look backward and discusses why we have not reached what has been described in the last 5 years of ubiquitous computing. How might we criticize assumptions and build upon existing models and approaches to design in this context? Can we learn from the discrepancy between the utopia of ubicomp and its deployed reality?
The purpose is to generate debate about the design and integration of ubiquitous systems based on case studies proposed from workshop participants. Moreover, we want to open up a debate around the future of those systems as well as the adoption by a large user base.
The session will start by a short presentation by participants who will each have to describe in 2-3 minutes a ubiquitous computing system that failed and give reasons or causes for that. This will allow to bring context to the discussion as well as elements to be formalized for criticizing what went wrong with the ubicomp metaphors proposed so far. This first phase will also provide material for break-out activities in which groups will be asked to use it to explore the pathway from the future back to today in terms of systems, user adoption and possible drivers for change. In a second phase, participants will be separated in groups to work on scenarios of new interaction rituals that would take into account the limits and shortcoming described previously.
