Divining a Digital Future: Mess and Mythology in Ubiquitous Computing

“We draw on the more scholarly domains where Big Data research and tools are developed and employed (e.g., Dourish and Bell 2011, Ch. 1) in order to anchor our approach; however, we believe this paper is also relevant for the more commercial and less academic facets of Big Data, because all should…”

“…and evolving, strategic narratives communicated by leaders about change, the purpose, and the value of AI are important in shaping ubiquitous technology reception and growth in distinctive collectivities and institutional contexts (Boyd & Holton, 2018; DiMaggio et al., 2001; Dourish & Bell, 2011).”

“These can motivate people and organizations to work certain technological areas, whether it is imagining the internet (Flichy, 2008) or visions of ubiquitous computing (Dourish and Bell, 2011).”

“…actions embody a paradigmatic geographical shift rep‐ resented by works on cities (Sassen, 2006), mediaci‐ ties (Eckardt, 2008), platforms (Grech, 2015), networks (Castells, 2008), ubicomp infrastructure mess (Dourish & Bell, 2011), or mobile interfaces (de Souza e Silva, 2006; Farman, 2012).”

“Dourish and Bell (2011) reviewed the current gaps in HCI research for Ubiquitous Computing from an ethnographic perspective with the conclusion that social and cultural consideration will enhance future HCI design through a socio-technical practice.”

“This view reduces ethnography to a data collection method and misses its potential to provide rich insights about how technology is integrated into social and cultural worlds [34].”

“As the history of ubiquitous computing has shown, the emergence and adoption of new technologies occurs differently from the predictive narratives told by the companies and researchers producing and creating the devices [18].”

“This reality requires a new and more detailed understanding of how everyday life in the home is lived and organized (Dourish and Bell, 2011; Taylor and Swan, 2005).”

“…devices and those provided by their current employers or clients, they assemble collections of material and digital resources that combine personal, public, and corporate elements into some sort of evolving and seamed arrangement (per Dourish and Bell, 2011; Mainwaring et al., 2005; Vertesi, 2014).”

“The social implications of this phase of densely, often connected phase of the Internet are still being debated [2–5].”

“In contrast to the ideal and linear way in which IoT is often pursued by companies, it is actually expected that IoT will be highly heterogeneous, encompassing objects completely different in terms of functionality, technology and application fields [3, 14].”

“In the bigger picture, the technological development relating to, for example, smart-homes, smart-cars or the Internet-of-things is arguably driven by collective visions and myths about ubiquitous or pervasive computing (see Dourish & Bell, 2011).”

“MomConnect registration activity. propose that mHealth research would benefit from drawing on this perspective further, for example by examining how the public and private are blurred (Dourish & Bell, 2011), and “invisible work” (Nardi & Engeström, 1999) contributes to mobile system use.”

“…in a computing context to standards, software, and hardware as a metaphor that in common use entails an underlying foundation that enables work or activity but that also has relational entailments that expand infrastructure beyond a material substrate (Dourish & Bell, 2011; Star & Ruhleder, 1996).”

“While new technological systems are often celebrated with utopic visions, development of ubiquitous computing and by extension, today ’ s IoT environments are “ inherently messy ” as “ uneven infra-structures are encountered and navigated ” (Dourish and Bell, 2011: 42).”

“They weave-themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it’, a point also made by Dourish and Bell (2011) in their investigation into the ubiquity of the digital in day-to-day life.”

“…involves focusing on how they act in the present as they relate to the “proximate futures” of their own practices and the trajectories of their work (Dourish and Bell 2011). concretely, we observed the Platform intelligence in News (PiN) project, an ai innovation project partly funded by a…”

“‘ Multisensorial ethnography ’ (Pink, 2011; Pink, 2015) could provide a unique phenomenological approach to perception on the move (see also Dourish & Bell, 2011).”

“However, in today’s practices, a technology-centric approach is typically used in defining platform architecture capabilities in the computer chip manufacturing industry (Bell 2001; Bell et al. 2003; Dourish and Bell 2011).”

“An earlier version of this article was presented under the same title at the ACSP-AESOP 4th Joint Congress, Chicago, Illinois, July 2008.”

“The outcomes of studies where ethnography and design meet have often been successful [e.g. 8]; nevertheless, Dourish and Bell [13] highlighted how ethnography can produce two kinds of results, both relevant to design: (1) design recommendations, often derived from empirical aspects of ethnographic…”

“We discuss how the sociocultural processes of meaning making build up the technological experience [14] of encountering and living with urban computing systems.”

“By reviewing how futures get created, we can understand the dynamics in emerging technologies and locate the contrasting visions within these discursive communities (Dourish and Bell, 2011; Liao, 2019).”

“Through the waves of HCI research - from ergonomics to the cognitive, to the social, to the cultural and, recently, to the civic, the field builds on the persistent implicit assumption that “new technologies will, in some way, shape, or form, be desirable and advance social progress” [22], [23].”

“Consequently, these methods often fail to uncover the underlying causes and power asymmetries that contribute to the outcomes produced by automated systems (Dourish and Bell, 2011; O ’ Neil, 2016; Köchling and Wehner, 2020).”

“Metaphors are not only tools that people use to make sense of complex socio-technical systems (Ratzan, 2000), they also shape these systems in profound ways (Bory, 2020; Dourish & Bell, 2011; Wyatt, 2021).”

“With its northern location and just 140,000 inhabitants, Oulu is quite an atypical city for an urban ubiquitous computing (henceforth ‘ubicomp’) infrastructure, as most of the time it is implemented in metropo-lises such as New York and Tokyo (Dourish and Bell, 2011).”

“However, cultural factors such as notions of property, kinship, sharing, and people’s relational ontology also influence how new media technologies are integrated in everyday lives (see also Dourish and Bell, 2011; Horst, 2012: 61; Rennie et al., 2015; Vaarzon-Morel, 2014).”

“…on other spheres of life has turned out to be infuriatingly multifaceted, difficult to capture, and impossible to explain in simple terms (e.g., Dourish and Bell 2011), a closer look at archaeological information work shows that the digital’s impact is considerably more vague and volatile than…”

“While presented as the ideal life for humans, ideals presented in mainstream “technofutures” [33] might in fact form ideal worlds for technologies – clean, streamlined, smooth, regular.”

“Studies of the emergent social practices that surround mobile technology use emphasize the ways that these technologies are bound up in the social production of space and spatiality (e.g., Dourish & Bell, 2011; Ito, Okabe, & Matsuda, 2005).”

“Best representative of our own perspective, is that of Dourish and Bell [3], as expressed by their statement, “We start from the position that technology and social life are not easily separated – that social life is already entwined with technologies and technological practices of all kinds, and that technologies and…”

“Scholars have discussed how this leisurely future has been represented as being just around the corner for over a decade (Dourish & Bell, 2011).”

“Detrimental impacts on adults, adolescents, and children from continual connectivity include lowered social skills, self-motivation, emotional intelligence, and empathy, as well as increased conflict with others, ADHD, and depression in younger populations [22, 23] (Fig.”

“In the global near future we are likely to be living in a context of mixed technologies, infrastructures; a digital “mess” (Dourish and Bell 2011).”

“In short, digitisation is a site of social and cultural production (Dourish and Bell, 2011: 42), which also invokes managerial, societal and governmental ideas and ideals in organisations about improving given industries (Plesner et al., 2018).”

“…before, an important consideration, when analysing situational requirements for technology use, is an investigation of disruptions that occur when technical products are staged within social situations such as homes, or in our case, manufacturing or construction sites (Dourish and Bell 2011).”

“Such unawareness of mundanised geographic practices brings notions such as ‘ubiquitous computing’ (Dourish & Bell, 2011) or ‘ubiquitous photography’ (Hand, 2016) to the fore, at least as reminders that image production, mobile devices and location happen within our everyday media practice.”

“…(or infrastructural) shaping. the current ‘third wave’ of mobile media research, influenced in part by the infra-structural turn in sts (see Dourish & Bell, 2011; star & Bowker, 2002) emphasises the dynamics of power that might emerge through the technical, social, political and regulatory…”

“…that are “designed particularly to allow people to navigate a space defined not according to Cartesian measures but instead relationally and histori-cally—one in which people, along with relationships and movements, determine the parameters of spatial experience” (Dourish & Bell, 2011, p. 135).”

“He recommended, as did Fogg, that they engage in a process of stakeholder analysis to think about the wider ethical implications of a new technology (Verbeek 2006). In this developing field of persuasive technology design, the focus has thus been on the ethical responsibilities of the designers to consider the consequ…”

“These two cases reveal how automation takes work, adaptation, and redirection—and involves a deal of “mess and mythology” (Dourish and Bell, 2011).”

“A futures anthropology approach to emerging technologies appreciates that life with technology is messy (Dourish and Bell 2011), futures are uncertain (Akama, Pink, and Sumartojo 2018) and breakage and maintenance is inseparable from the everyday (Russell and Vinsel 2016).”

“Already present in the everyday lives of many, smart home technologies (SHTs) can be seen as a future-oriented group of technologies (Dourish & Bell, 2011).”

“Yelp, especially as accessed through the smartphone, enhances new forms of spatial legibility (Dourish & Bell, 2011) that enable people to access new forms of social, digital information about a location.”

“Like emerging technologies, smart city imaginaries invoke their own imminence in reference to constantly shifting horizons of possibility and threat (Alvial-Palavicino, 2015; Dourish and Bell, 2011; Galloway, 2013; Kinsley, 2010, 2011, 2012; White, 2016).”

“…which is defined as the dispersal of computing power— through devices like mobile phones—into the urban landscape itself, with the subsequent changes to urban movement and the flow of information throughout a city and the world (Dourish and Bell, 2011; Greenfield and Shepard, 2007; Weiser, 1991).”

“Research that brings together anthropology and design consistently shows: how the mess-iness (Dourish & Bell, 2011) and everyday uncertainties (Akama et al., 2018) of everyday life with technology complicate and unlodge such predicted futures as they unfold (Pink et al., 2017; Strengers et al.,…”

“The HCI community has had a longstanding interest in the home, the domestic and connected devices; that acknowledges the complex and contested nature of this space [3,4,5,6,8,10].”

“Digital interactions are often seamful when embedded in the messiness of everyday life (cf. Dourish & Bell, 2011; see Singh & Jackson, 2017 for seams of Aadhaar speci fi cally).”

“Dourish and Bell argue that privacy is “ not merely ways in which information is managed but also ways in which social actions are achieved ” (p. 160), and criticise the understanding of privacy as merely a quantity of data points [11].”

“Although some authors point out early antecedents for Magical Realism (Faris [32] for instance cites Don Quixote as an example) a reasonable (but non-comprehensive) definition starts with Latin American authors including notably Gabriel García Márquez, Isabella Allende, Juan Rulfo, and Laura…”

“Centering “proximate futures” and the associated techno-utopian or techno-dystopian visions tend to distract from the unresolved issues of the present [47].”