When Users “Do” the Ubicomp
Antti Oulasvirta

University of California at Berkeley and

Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT | [e-mail]

[ 1] Bell, G., and P. Dourish, “Yesterday’s tomorrows: Notes on ubiquitous computing’s dominant vision.” Personal and Ubiquitous Computing 11, no. 2 (2006): 133-143.

[ 2] Mainwaring, S.D., Anderson, K., and Chang, M.F. Living for the global city: Mobile kits, urban interfaces, and ubicomp. In Proc. Ubicomp’05, Springer (2005): 268-286.

Computers have become ubiquitous, but in a different way than envisioned in the 1990s. To master the present-day ubicomp—a multilayered agglomeration of connections and data, distributed physically and digitally, and operating under no recognizable guiding principles—the user must exhibit foresight, cunning, and perseverance. Preoccupation with Weiserian visions of ubicomp may have diverted HCI research toward problems that do not meet the day-to-day needs of developers.

 

[ 3] Woodruff, A., Anderson, A., Mainwaring, S.D., and Aipperspach, R. Portable, but not mobile: A study of wireless laptops in the home. In Proc. Pervasive’07, Springer (2007): 216-233.

ing only recently. To mention a few, Mainwaring and colleagues studied the things urbanites carry with them and how these things are perceived to “ interface” with the urban environment [ 2]. Woodruff and colleagues examined temporal patterns of using a laptop at home [ 3]. Our own study of mobile information workers at Nokia’s internal IT division, reported in Oulasvirta and Sumari [ 4], explains some of the tactics and discipline people develop and the ensuing burden when working with multiple portable and nonportable computing devices. These articles show many ways in which it is the users who have to “do” ubicomp; that is, actively create the resources for using an application in a heterogeneous, multicomputer environment.

 

March + April 2008

[ 4] Oulasvirta, A., and Sumari, L. Mobile kits and laptop trays: Managing multiple devices in mobile information work. In Proc. CHI’07, ACM Press (2007): 1127-1136.

The Two Ubicomps Ubiquitous computing can be viewed from two distinct perspectives. On the one hand there is the avant-garde that gets presented in scientific conferences and follows Mark Weiser’s and others’ visions on context awareness, beyond-GUI interfaces, and new networking techniques. On the other, present-day IT infrastructure, “the real ubicomp,” is a massive noncentralized agglomeration of the devices, connectivity and electricity means, applications, services, and interfaces, as well as material objects such as cables and meeting rooms and support surfaces that have emerged almost anarchistically, without a recognized set of guiding principles. This infrastructure is not homogenous or seamless, but fragmented into several techniques that the user has to study and use. These

techniques typically connect only two devices or applications at a time. This form of ubicomp is not embedded in the environment, but its logic is affected by remote factors often opaque to the user, such as servers, and by other people.

In their paper, entitled provocatively “Yesterday’s Tomorrows,” Bell and Dourish lamented that “ubicomp has turned out to be characterized by improvisation and appropriation; by technologies lashed together and maintained in synch only through considerable efforts; by surprising appropriations of technology for purposes never imagined by their inventors [ 1].” The image in Figure 1 is an example of what those look like in their best (or worst).

It may be that complexity of the existing ubicomp is one key explanation to why ubicomp applications have not conquered the consumer market, although more than a decade of research has produced numerous should-be-convincing demonstrations. According to a keynote speech at MobileHCI 2006, Nokia lost $4.5 billion in a year because of product returns and complaints, of which approximately 20 percent was caused by problems attributable to usability and complexity.

Yet the bulk of empirical studies looking at ubicomp at an extra-application level has been close to nonexistent, aris-

A Study of Computer Jugglers

To explain what is behind these dramatic-sounding claims, let us revisit observations from one of the aforementioned studies [ 4]. Eleven workers, all extreme users to whom ubicomp means both the content and means of work, were interviewed and observed. In their daily pursuits, much of what is wrong about ubicomp became visible.

All workers had multiple devices to choose from: at least a smartphone plus a laptop, and a mobile phone, as well as various necessary accessories such