+Commissioned by Rhizome.org+
Interview with Adam Greenfield
by Christina Ray
I recently met up with Adam Greenfield, author of Everyware: The
Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, to discuss the book's ideas over
coffee. Everyware was published in 2006 and draws upon Adam's
background as a user experience consultant and critical futurist to
describe the subtle yet persistent diffusion of computing technology
into the landscape. Against the espresso machine hum, the cafe's iPod
shuffling through indie rock tunes, and the register jingle, we
talked about speed and convenience as the seductions that drive our
increasingly mediated reality. And we pondered the cultural,
ecological, and ethical costs of living with everyware and where we
go from here .
CR: From where we are right now, what kinds of everyware or pre-
everyware can you identify?
AG: Remember when you were a kid, and you were first writing letters
to your friends, and you'd lavish a ridiculous amount of detail on
the return address? "127 North Van Pelt Street, Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania, 19103, USA, North America, Earth, the Solar System"? It
turns out that "where," in the everyware context, is a little like
that – in order to give you an answer as to "where I am right now,"
in the sense that's most relevant to this discussion, I'd have to
specify all the situations and contexts in which I'm presently
implicated.
Some of these situations are physical, and they're unfolding at a
nested series of scales. So I'm simultaneously in the United States,
and in Brooklyn, and at the given address of this cafe. And, of
course, I also happen to be in a room, and sitting at a table, and in
close proximity to an array of tools and devices at that scale.
At the most global scale, I'm already implicated in ubiquitous
systems, at this very moment, by dint of those ghostly traces of me
that exist in networked databases – property register, driver's
license, utility accounts – and which associate me with this
location. Those, in turn, can be correlated with an IP address that
locates me virtually. In front of me are my mobile phone and wallet
and transit pass, lying on the table, and those things are all either
presently networked or designed to be used with the global
information network.
Increasingly, we inhabit what I think of as an order of networked
things. I think of each of them, as diverse and heterogeneous and
apparently unrelated as they are, as nothing other than tendrils of
ubiquity. All that would be necessary for these things to constitute
everyware, in the sense I discuss in the book, is for them to start
talking to one another – and we're already beginning to see the
signs of just such a convergence.
All of this is a way of saying that, if you want to detect the traces
of emergent ubiquity in the world around you, it can't hurt to
cultivate a certain sense of the paranoid-critical. Look around you:
It's there to be seen, if you have but the eyes to see it.
CR: You've described a sense of wonder at seeing how women in Hong
Kong almost immediately adapted to a new subway entrance system by
simply swishing their handbags containing their passes over the
turnstile's RFID reader. This lets them glide on through without
having to stop, and was a completely self-taught "dance" that emerged
on its own. What other adaptive behavior have you encountered that
responds to everyware in public space?
AG: One of the things I've really enjoyed about being out on the road
so much this year, and giving my talk in so many places, is that
people will come up to me afterward and tell me their own stories,
share their own experiences of this nascent ubiquity.
So I'll get people saying that their academic department or their job
has doors which are unlocked with the RFID nametags they're required
to wear - but that men in these situations will leave these cards in
their wallet, and the wallet in their back pocket, so that the
interaction with the system consists of them half-turning and rubbing
their ass on the card reader. I love that, and I'm particularly
interested to see the sorts of language that emerge around behaviors
like that.
But I've seen, probably, a great deal more behavior that has not yet
adapted to the fact of our engagement with networked devices in
public space. If you pay attention to this sort of thing, you see
social conflict breaking out all along the fault lines, with concerns
emerging around things like mobile phone etiquette, continuous
partial attention, whether someone should stop messaging and look up
from their Blackberry long enough to order a coffee, if you're
justified in not tipping a cab driver if they're on a phone headset
during your entire trip, and so on. And should we forget that
surveillance is at least as much a question of Little Brother as of
Big Brother, there's always the object lesson of 'Dog Poop Girl' (see
link below) to keep in the back of our minds.
CR: In the book you propose several features that should be designed
into everyware. Everyware should default to harmlessness; be self-
disclosing; be conservative of face and time; and be deniable. Could
you expand upon these ideas a little?
AG: I believe that when designers imagine systems that by their very
nature assume a great deal of responsibility for the outcome of
situations, that exert an outsized and even unprecedented influence
on life chances, they should among other things be held to the very
highest standards of ethical design. This goes beyond the idea of
installing appropriate safeguards for identity and privacy – it's
not even properly a technical question, but a moral one.
However unfashionable or bourgeois it may be, I believe in all those
good old Enlightenment values: that you always already have the
inalienable right to your privacy, your time and self-determination
and personal autonomy. You have the right to know that information
about you is being collected, and by whom, and what they are
proposing to do with that information. We should demand that the
ubiquitous systems we're subjected to be designed in such a way as to
respect these prerogatives – further, that we be able to refuse
exposure to any system which does not, at least in private space.
(It's probably too late to assert any such principle in the public
sphere.)
In that sense, there's nothing in the Everyware principles that's
even specifically about ubiquitous computing: This conversation is
older than history, and obviously far better heads than mine have
taken it up.
CR: From conferences to new university courses to corporate marketing
departments, the subject of ubiquitous computing is becoming
ubiquitous. In your book, Thesis 69 reads, "It is ethically incumbent
on the designers of ubiquitous systems and environments to afford the
human user some protection." Are engineers, designers, students, and
companies having discussions on the ethics of protecting users?
AG:I think that a vanguard few are, yeah, even if in the latter case
it's only as a business differentiator. It's going to be exceedingly
difficult for most engineers to consider these questions, though, for
the very good reason that so often, the sorts of effects of
ubiquitous systems that I personally find so worrisome can only be
understood as emergent behavior. That is, they arise out of the free
interplay of discrete, distributed, networked systems. We're talking
about a class of behaviors that can't necessarily be predicted at
design time, even in principle. I'm the first to admit that
incorporating the sorts of prerogatives we've discussed into the
design of new products and services is not at all a simple thing to
ask for.
I think it really takes someone able to step back from a given
device, or even a given technology, to discern how it will interact
ecologically with the others already on the table, those currently
emerging, and the pre-existing body of everyday cultural practices.
Traditionally, this has been just where information architects and
other user-experience professionals have had so much to offer, and I
still I have high hopes that the UX community will rise to the
challenge of everyware. As far as deep, ongoing conversations,
though, I don't really see it happening. Not yet. And, you know, the
hour is late.
CR: The emergence of everyware can be, as you describe in the book,
often quiet and subtle. No one's shouting, "Hey we just developed a
device that tracks your every movement." Unless or until a major
techno-disaster forces problems into the public arena, how do
concerned citizens identify what's frequently invisible?
That's a great question, an absolutely crucial one, and I'm afraid I
don't have a very good answer for it. About all I can offer is the
suggestion that we all try to do a better job of questioning – with
rigor and honesty and fearlessness – the assumptions undergirding
every new technological product and service we're offered. Will this
really make my life easier? What are some of the less-obvious
implications of inviting this into my life? What might I be giving up
in exchange for what this is offering me? And what would my world
look like if everyone adopted it?
These, again, are not obvious questions, and we're just not used to
thinking along these lines. So a big part of what I see myself as
being engaged in is something very old-fashioned: consciousness
raising. It's something I'm pursuing in the hope that I can both
learn to make decisions about emergent technologies that I'll be
happier with in the long run for myself, and help other folks do so
as well, on their own behalf.
+ Christina Ray is an artist and curator living in Brooklyn and the
founder of Glowlab, a project to support and develop art/tech
experiments exploring the nature of cities. Glowlab produces the
annual Conflux festival in New York.
LINKS:
+ http://www.studies-observations.com/everyware/
+ http://www.v-2.org
+ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_poop_girl
+ http://christinaray.com
+ http://glowlab.com
+ http://confluxfestival.org
Interview With Adam Greenfield by Christina Ray
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Type: discussion