Positive Technology Journal

From Pasta and Vinegar 

Rogers, Y. (2006) Moving on from Weiser’s vision of of calm computing: engaging UbiComp experiences. In: P. Dourish and A. Friday (Eds.) Ubicomp 2006 Proceedings, LNCS 4206, pp. 404-421, Springer-Verlag.

In this paper, the author starts from the classical ubicomp description by Mark Weisre about a potential era of “calm computing” and explains how research in that domain did not match these expectations. The most important stance of Yvonne Rogers lays in this idea that “An alternative agenda is outlined that focuses on engaging rather than calming people” so that academics can have a new research agenda:

There is an enormous gap between the dream of comfortable, informed and effortless living and the accomplishments of UbiComp research. As pointed out by Greenfield [20] “we simply don’t do ‘smart’ very well yet” because it involves solving very hard artificial intelligence problems that in many ways are more challenging than creating an artificial human.
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To this end, I propose one such alternative agenda which focuses on designing UbiComp technologies for engaging user experiences. It argues for a significant shift from proactive computing to proactive people; where UbiComp technologies are designed not to do things for people but to engage them more actively in what they currently do.