Ubiquitous Computing - Nour Diab Yunes

Startups on The connected Home, TV, and Living Room

On May 7, 2013 I attended an event entitled "The connected Home, TV, and Living Room" sponsored by MIT and Verizon at the Yotel Hotel in New York. The talks consisted of 4 startup representatives who Verizon named "Ninja Innovators"… this is I am assuming open to interpretation. Presenters were allowed a total of 3 minutes each, or so.

Kuniavsky’s “Information Shadows”

Information shadows enable users to access information about their products and experience them in very different ways than could have been imaginable before the Internet. Today, products mean so much more to people and impact their product/customer experiences in new ways. With built-in ubicomp, customers experience products that have a much wider network of associations.

user experience in ubiquitous-computing

Because ubicomp is, by definition, present everywhere and at-all-times, it may either interfere or facilitate contextual actions, and hence change the ways in which we act upon and perceive the environment. For Greenfield, "we" –ubicomp designers– "are uniquely positioned to affect the emergence of this technological milieu for the better." We can partake in the paradigm shift from technologies that provide uncertainty, insecurity, and that violate privacy, to designing technologies that empower users, and that support ethical, social, and environmental well-being.

“calm technology” (Weiser & Brown, 1996)

According the Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown (1996), "peripheral information" extends the notion of "affordances" to describe action enabling technologies that are reachable, yet on the periphery of perception and therefore encalming.

defining: Ubiquitous Computing

In 1991, Mark Weiser defined ubiquitous computing (which he also calls "embodied virtuality", as opposed to virtual reality) as invisible and indistinguishable from the "fabric of everyday life"; that is, from human behavior. Which is to say that ubiquitous computing aims at providing humane tools with which beings can continue dealing with their world in very much the same behavioral ways.