[Ubicomp] Vision

1. Mark Weiser, The Computer for the 21th Century, Scientific American, September 1991.
2. Mark Weiser, Some computer science issues in ubiquitous computing, Communications of the ACM, 36(7):75-85, July 1993.
   
   • my slides
   • This paper: good for us to understand main ideas and spirits of Ubicomp, and also realize design and implementation issues.
   • It seems that if we want to have a new design of Ubicomp, we will be limited by or have to counter hardware issues first. No wonder there are also some discussions about how can we design to make users feel easy to change Ubicomp objects. (e.g. u-Texture: Self-Organizable Universal Panels for Creating Smart Surroundings, Ubicomp 2005)
   • However, if we are limited by hardware problems, it is possible that interesting designs will be only ideas. (e.g. Jackie Lee from MIT media lab: physical Word.)
   • It is important to understand the history of the field you want to research.
3. (V3) Winograd, T., From computing machinery to interaction design, In Peter Denning and Robert Metcalfe (eds.), Beyond Calculation: The Next Fifty Years of Computing, Springer-Verlag, 1997, 149-162.
4. (V4) Mark Weiser, John S. Brown, The Coming Age of Calm Technology, 1996.

Discussion:

• What does it mean for a computer to disappear?
• Physical V.S. feeling
• Complexity: present給人用的方式感覺
• Object展現的方式、樣子 is very important(affordance, e.g. door – you know how to open it)
• If computers are as mature as motors, it will be nature
• Weiser: focus on user ability, instead of strong computing
  less about performance, but principles on applying to daily life
  also a trade-off: hope that we can use little attention but achieve high performace/output/work

Ubicomp course @NTU 2006/2/27