Found an interesting article on A List Apart, Adam Greenfield’s Everyware:
In everyware, the garment, the room and the street become sites of processing and mediation. Household objects from shower stalls to coffee pots are reimagined as places where facts about the world can be gathered, considered, and acted upon. And all the familiar rituals of daily life, things as fundamental as the way we wake up in the morning, get to work, or shop for our groceries, are remade as an intricate dance of information about ourselves, the state of the external world, and the options available to us at any given moment. In all of these scenarios, there are powerful informatics underlying the apparent simplicity of the experience, but they never breach the surface of awareness: things Just Work. Rather than being filtered through the clumsy arcana of applications and files and sites, interactions with everyware feel natural, spontaneous, human. Ordinary people finally get to benefit from the full power of information technology, without having to absorb the esoteric bodies of knowledge on which it depends. And the sensation of use—even while managing an unceasing and torrential flow of data—is one of calm, of relaxed mastery. This, anyway, is the promise.
As he goes on to talk about, the ramifications of this (and I do see it happening, to some level) can be both very good and very bad. For me, the idea of technology “just working” and feeling “natural, spontaneous, human” gives me goosebumps. That’s beauty.
[tags]everyware, Adam Greenfield[/tags]
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