Adaptive Path Blog

I have an interest in ubiquitous and situated computing, thus I was pleased recently to lurk on an email list about the topic, which as I quickly found out was almost entirely populated by academics. And…wow. Not only did most of the talk go way over my head, most of it was nearly a parody of academic speak. A sample:

You mention the “current status of the material object [and] forms of embodied interaction” and I’ve often thought about this ‘return’ to the body and the physical after the (failed?) promises of cyberspace disembodiment. In other words, I see a kind of re-embodiment ethos at work right now in research, art and design practice, and a re-newed commitment to the material. In some ways, then, it seems that the pendulum of technological desire has merely swung to the other side.

Me: Unsubscribe.

Now, it’s of course entirely unfair of me to pull a random quote out of context like that (No offense to the author, whose work and writing I like and follow.), but there’s a lot of discussion on this topic that is like that. Looking over the speakers of this week’s Situated Technologies Conference and the recent Ubicomp conference, one couldn’t help notice the number of high-level talks by academics with titles like Exurban Noir and Deconstructing Networked Infrastructures and Experience.

This is probably to be expected, I suppose. Most of this stuff is fairly theoretical right now, so it should be no surprise that the talk about it is also theoretical. But still. The discussions around ubicomp and situated technologies remind me of the academic papers from the late-1980s/early 1990s in which computer scientists and HCI folks (i.e. the CHI crowd) were discussing and creating their own (fantasy) world of what a global, hypertext system might be like. There were all these fantastical systems of what a hyperlink might look like and such. And of course, the internet came along (and, to an extent, hypercard before that) and utterly ruined their theories and went in totally unplanned directions because, for the most part, it wasn’t built by academics. So it will also likely be for the world of ubicomp.

What I’d like to see is practitioners take ownership of ubicomp and situated technologies. We can’t have the voices speaking for them only be coming from the ivory towers.

In fact, one could make the bold claim that, despite the rich history of academia feeding the tech industry, it’s been quite a number of years since this has been true in interaction design. The speed and change of the industry over the last 15 years has progressed faster than most universities can keep up with, and the walled garden around most academic research makes it nearly impossible for most practitioners to be influenced or informed by their work — not with so much other information freely available on the internet, created by other practitioners. Indeed, before I went to grad school, I’d never seen or read an academic white paper on HCI or interaction design.

Now, I’m not saying there’s no value in academic research or discourse. Only that when it becomes a barrier to entry into subjects that those in field care about, then I think there’s something off-balanced. Look at the number of non-academic designers who avoid CHI every year, for example.

As Hamlet notes, there is more to heaven and earth than are dreamt of in philosophies. Theory can only take us so far. Building — crafting — has to begin.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 16th, 2006 at 7:29 pm and is filed under Idealism, uncensored, The Big Picture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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