UbiComp 2005 Workshop: Situating Ubiquitous Computing in Everyday Life: Bridging the Social and Technical Divide
In the words of Mark Weiser, ubiquitous computing technologies should “weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life.” Despite the appeal of this image there currently is a noticeable divide between technical developments and their resonance with the everyday settings in which they might be deployed. As a first measure in what has to be a long-term consideration of these issues we invite participation from interdisciplinary researchers who have experience in the field. The goal of this workshop is to enable themes of generic purchase to the developers of UbiComp systems to be initially identified and articulated, and later incorporated into design and practice.
Topics: To foster collaboration we have in mind a workshop programme that brings social scientists, computer scientists, and engineers together to consider themes of broad relevance to situating ubiquitous computing in everyday life. The topics proposed are these:
* Interaction Design: to raise the study of individuals’ interactions with one another, through artefacts that are situated in the environments they inhabit;
* Accountability: to address the problem of accountability as heterogeneous computing applications and devices proliferate, combine and become more complex;
* Awareness: to articulate the role of the ‘ecology’ in awareness and the ways in which people exploit the ecologies they inhabit to organize their interactions;
* Tangibility: to drawing attention to the close coupling of object manipulation with the ecology of space, opening up new avenues for interdisciplinary consideration of the interplay between social studies and the design of ubiquitous devices;
* Coordination: to consider concerns with control, privacy, and the coordination of interaction more generally, developing a range of socio-technical protocols to support interaction.
* Context: to extend beyond metrics to sense-making and to provide for the meaningful character of interaction.