Anticipatory or representational visions of ubiquitous computing
Posted: September 9th, 2008 | 7 Comments »Catching up with accumulated RSS feeds, I read with great pleasure the slides from Sam Kinsley‘s presentation at the RGS-IBG annual international conference.
Kinsley interestingly addresses the vision of ubiquitous computing and how it is employed in the domain of corporate R&D. He takes the example of HP’s Cooltown project and what “stories” were set to define the project and the vision. Of course there were some issues with the large quantity of material produced in the Cooltown project. Some excerpts I enjoyed from Kinsley’s notes:
“After CEO prominence came, some HP managers went to this producer to create a ‘vision’ video for CoolTown. From a corporate ‘vision’ perspective: the video was a very compact articulation of a lot of things CoolTown as a research project was trying to say about the type of world being created by these types of technologies. From the technology research scientist standpoint – there were things about the video they liked, but many things that made them cringe and say ‘we didn’t say it would work like that’. As some of the researchers saw it, the producer wasn’t very ‘tech savvy’.
The video became an interesting double-edged sword. It had a particular effect on how CoolTown was received. It wasn’t accurate to technological development the ensued but represented a ‘vision’. The researchers felt that the overly emotive and simplistic corporate vision elided some of the interesting and important things they were trying to achieve to make the world better.
(…)
whilst visions are not necessarily realised, nor likely to be, they are productive of particular types of relation between researchers, business managers, clients and various places and things. (…) Vision texts and videos are, in most cases, certainly not glimpses of a future. Rather, they are representational constructs born of anticipatory impetus. “
Why do I blog this? I often find interesting when this sort of gap is revealed as it shows the importance of culture and imaginary expectations in technological developments. The notion of “visions” less teleogical but representational is also important here as it shows that reality is more complex than presented in the pop press/PR communication.
I have enjoyed reading your blog for some time, so its interesting to read your comments – thanks for blogging about my talk. It is interesting how much agency can be ascribed to ‘vision videos’, which can elide the tensions and messiness (as Anne Galloway deftly explores in her recent thesis) inherent to the assemblage of participants that come together under the guise of the apparently represented projects. Microsoft’s ‘future vision’ videos might be another such example, e.g. the recent ‘health vision’ – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6F1u36Y-qlE One of the things I am trying to do in my research is investigate the types of anticipatory knowledge that are practiced in ‘ubicomp’ and cognate research.
Exactly, I am personally interested in why products and services fail and what role the vision plays out in the failure. The idea of proximal futures as main path which eclipses other alternative scenarios/visions is very important IMO.
During an interesting presentation at MobileHCI last week TNO Human Factors showed a video created by the Dutch police force who had been asked to present what they thought mobile location-based technology could do to improve their work on the streets. The video showed officers watching each others’ movements on PDAs, dropping digital notes at locations, checking on warrants, and so on. Of course we all laughed when the video showed an officer’s PDA stopping her just in time from wandering without back-up into a group of youths, but I think that while corporate vision has momentum and market-persuasiveness those of us on the development end of technology need to give more such opportunities to potential end-users to create ‘visions’.
Yes, ‘failure’ is an interesting point. The visions of products and services mostly depict, of course, faultless, spotless and serene scenarios. Yet, failure is what makes many technologies more visible, to borrow Heidegger’s terminology, it ‘turns’ things that were ‘ready-to-hand’, available for use without necessarily thinking, to ‘present-at-hand’, at the forefront of consciousness. Two geographers, Nigel Thrift and Stephen Graham wrote an interesting article on this in the journal ‘Theory, Culture & Society’: “Out of order” – http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0263276407075954/
Another way of thinking about vision and failure might be the recent example of Microsoft’s attempt to ‘re-vision’ Windows Vista through the ‘Mojave’ campaign.
This is an interesting question : the different potentials of different scenarios. I think it depends on the purpose, the target, for instance, i worked on “corporate” technologies future scenarios but also i had to construct some representations for some “acceptability tests” or “potential ideas” ; here there were still some raw materials, and i had some slack in my narratives to show the futur real world interfering with the ideal situation : for instance, in a noisy area, or within a tendious relation between two persons. I also like reasoning on deconstructing the narratives by creating what i would call “substituability” or how presently we could recreate the technologic and user scenario with actual users and technologies : this is very interesting because immediatly, many things become possible with the reality, and you can evaluate the path of a potentially good concept…
Sam: thanks for the reference! I should indeed look more carefully at the differences between ready and present at hand.
Etienne: I think it’s clearly the “raw and slack” part that is important here: because of the incompleteness of the vision, the flexibility allows to go beyond the “ideal situation”.
Anticipatory or representational visions of ubiquitous computing…
Catching up with accumulated RSS feeds, I read with great pleasure the slides from Sam Kinsley’s presentation at the RGS-IBG annual international conference….