Thesis 07

Everyware isn't so much a particular kind of hardware or software as it is a situation.

The difficult thing to come to terms with, when we're so used to thinking of "computing" as something to do with discrete devices, is that everyware finally isn't so much a particular kind of hardware, philosophy of software design, or set of interface conventions as it is a situationa set of circumstances.

Half the battle of making sense of this situation is learning to recognize when we've entered it. This is especially true because so much of what makes up everyware is "invisible" by design; we have to learn to recognize the role of everyware in a "smart" hotel room, a contactless payment system, and a Bluetooth-equipped snowboarding parka.

The one consistent thread that connects all of these applications is that the introduction of information processing has wrought some gross change in their behavior or potential. And yet it appears in a different guise in each of them. Sometimes everyware is just there: an ambient, environmental, enveloping field of information. At other times, it's far more instrumental, something that a user might consciously take up and turn to an end. And it's this slippery, protean quality that can make everyware so difficult to pin down and discuss.

Nevertheless, I hope I've persuaded you by now that there is in fact a coherent "it" to be considered, something that appears whenever there are multiple computing devices devoted to each human user; when this processing power is deployed throughout local physical reality instead of being locked up in a single general-purpose box; and when interacting with it is largely a matter of voice, touch, and gesture, interwoven with the existing rituals of everyday life.

We might go a step further: The diversity of ways in which everyware will appear in our livesas new qualities in the things that surround us, as a regime of ambient informatics, and as information processing dissolving in behaviorare linked not merely by a technical armature, but by a set of assumptions about the proper role of technology.

They're certainly different assumptions from the ones most of us have operated under for the last twenty or so years. The conceptual models we've been given to work with, both as designers of information technology and as users of it, break down completely in the face of the next computing.

As designers, we will have to develop an exquisite and entirely unprecedented sensitivity to contexts we've hitherto safely been able to ignore. As users, we will no longer be able to hold computing at arm's length, as something we're "not really interested in," whatever our predilections should happen to be. For better or worse, the everyware situation is one we all share.