Divining a Digital Future: Mess and Mythology in Ubiquitous Computing
A book by Paul Dourish and Genevieve Bell:
Description:
Ubiquitous computing (or "ubicomp") is the label for a "third wave" of computing technologies. Following the eras of the mainframe computer and the desktop PC, ubicomp is characterized by small and powerful computing devices that are worn, carried, or embedded in the world around us. The ubicomp research agenda originated at Xerox PARC in the late 1980s; these days, some form of that vision is a reality for the millions of users of Internet-enabled phones, GPS devices, wireless networks, and "smart" domestic appliances. In Divining a Digital Future, computer scientist Paul Dourish and cultural anthropologist Genevieve Bell explore the vision that has driven the ubiquitous computing research program and the contemporary practices that have emerged--both the motivating mythology and the everyday messiness of lived experience.
Reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of the authors' collaboration, the book takes seriously the need to understand ubicomp not only technically but also culturally, socially, politically, and economically. Dourish and Bell map the terrain of contemporary ubiquitous computing, in the research community and in daily life; explore dominant narratives in ubiquitous computing around such topics as infrastructure, mobility, privacy, and domesticity; and suggest directions for future investigation, particularly with respect to methodology and conceptual foundations.
Endorsements
This is an exciting, intellectually crackling critique of the influential paradigm of ubiquitous computing. It restraints the taking for granted of the present in the ethos of future-oriented IT labs by showing the future to be already embedded in the everyday experiences and practices of diverse cultural and social lives. Ethnography is the authors' chosen means, and in their wonderfully eclectic readings and impressive record of creative research, they show, topic by topic, how much of ubicomp is and will be shaped by designs for living. -- George Marcus, Director, Center for Ethnography, University of California, Irvine.
Most books on ubiquitous computing do little to examine fundamental cultural categoies like domesticity, privacy, ownership, and order, even if -- as Dourish and Bell argue -- infrastructure is inherently cultural as well as material. In a theoretically wide-ranging book filled with interesting case studies of 'messiness' from around the globe, as well as from the recent history of computing, they make a compelling case that science and technology studies and ethnography should play a more important role in the field of computing and the development of new mobile and embedded technologies. --
Liz Losh, Director, Culture, Art and Technology Program, University of California, San Diego.
Beautifully written and ubiquitously grounded in scholarship, this landmark book will open horizons for all interested in the way information technology works today, and how to design a better world from the infrastructure up. --
Geoffrey Bowker, Professor and Senior Scholar in Cyberscholarship, University of Pittsburgh.
Paul Dourish:
A Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, with courtesy appointments in Anthropology and Computer Science. His research interests span a wide range of concerns at the intersection of computer science and social science, with a particular interest in the cultural practices of digital media and their infrastructures. At the center of most of these projects is the idea of the digital imagination -- both how designers and researchers in information technology conceive of the technologies the produce, their users, and the relationships between the two, and how people adopt and adapt digital technologies as sites for producing their own cultural identities and imagining themselves and their societies.
Genevieve Bell:
Is an Australian born anthropologist and researcher. Born in Sydney, she is the director of Intel Corporation's Interaction and Experience Research and was the 15th Thinker in Residence in South Australia. In 2010, Bell was named as one of the top 25 women in technology to watch by AlwaysOn.
