Some workers accepted the risk of not having certain information conveniently accessible in all situations. By dedicating certain documents exclusively to certain devices, they could avoid synchronization work.

Interestingly, these strategies of distributing data between devices go hand-in-hand with physical demands and impediments, and vice versa. A superior strategy in carrying one’s mobile devices may be poor as it requires excess synchronization. We reported on the users’ “mobile kits,” i.e., keeping the repertoire of things carried fixed [ 2]. While having a more or less static kit reduces cognitive effort, it does so with the cost of manual labor, time, and physical effort stemming from the burden of packing, maintaining, and carrying the kit.

Weiser warned against “ making everything the same,” to which aiming for seamlessness would lead. Instead, we should design “beautiful seams” and seams that can be appropriated [ 6]. The present-day ubicomp, unfortunately, is not there yet. The seams are not visible and certainly not beautiful. The disconnected and fragmented technological resources must be known in advance, planned and prepared for. The nature of seams is not only a problem of the digital but they are also inherently linked to the way we structure our action and share efforts to tasks of physical nature, such as carrying devices.

ence, and invisibility as design drivers. The user should be able to peacefully concentrate on the task at hand and not disrupt others.

On the positive side, the workers were indeed able to use devices nondisruptively; or, at least, they did not problematize it. On the negative side, it was not because of devices’ clever design but because of new habits they acquired. Some learned how to set up their devices only one small step at a time in the beginning of meetings so that they could appear to be concentrating on the meeting, not on the laptop. To streamline the transition of computing state from one meeting to another, one worker had adopted the habit of closing the laptop lid but leaving the computer running and piling all auxiliaries on the top surface. Some workers thought that others perceive working on a bigger laptop while in a meeting as less disrupting than working on a smaller-screen smartphone that demands less attention.

Similarly to context-aware-ness and seamlessness, making choices that determine disrup-tiveness is a task left to the users.

digitally; 3) propagating metadata on migration of data from device to device; 4) supporting ad hoc uses of proximate devices’ resources like projectors, keyboards, and displays; 5) triggering digital events like synchronization of predetermined documents with physical gestures; and 6) supporting appropriation of material properties for support surfaces. Users essentially need new and more efficient ways to interop-erate devices, plan action in the face of “seams,” understand and manage technological complexity, plug their data into other devices, and align use fluently with everyday activities.

The drifting apart of HCI research and real-world ubicomp is worrisome because improving the state of affairs is not the duty of engineers alone. Ethnographers and user researchers can contribute to the efforts in improving ubicomp by studying practices that construct and keep it together [ 7].

[ 6] Chalmers, M., and Galani, A. Seamful interweaving: Heterogeneity in the theory and design of interactive systems. In Proc. DIS’04, ACM Press (2004): 243-252.

[ 7] Star, S.L. The ethnography of infrastructure. American Behavioral Scientist 43, 3 (1999).

 

Toward Fluent Multidevice Work Imagination is open for ideas on design. In the paper we presented what was basically a laundry list of approaches to improving ubicomp infrastructures: 1) minimizing overheads that create temporal seams between activities; 2) making remote but important resources, such as connectivity or cables, better transparent locally and

Acknowledgements I thank Lauri Sumari, Martti Mäntylä, Sakari Tamminen, Risto Sarvas, and Miikka Miettinen for sharing their thoughts. The Academy of Finland projects ContextCues and Amoveo have supported this work.

Doing Nondisruptiveness The final point concerns nondisruptiveness. Followers of Weiser’s vision have referred to concepts like calmness, ambi-

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Antti Oulasvirta is a postdoctoral scholar at the School of Information, University of California at Berkeley, and a research scientist at the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT, Finland.

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March + April 2008