Liz and I had a conversation yesterday based on my post about Neil Gershenfeld's book; specifically the part about the Web distracting people from ubicomp for most of the late 90s and early 00s.
Her point is that the Web had two big advantages over ubicomp in 1997 (whether or not it actually took resources away from ubicomp--it's not a zero-sum game):
The second point is really important, I think. Something that I've always talked about in UI design, and seem to have forgotten in my recent excitement with physical computing and the embedding of computation in everyday objects, is that people's ultimate goals in using any tool is to communicate with other people. There's little that's done solely by yourself, for yourself. That's a pretty boring closed system...and it's boring by definition since, by definition, we find purely solitary behavior kinda boring, on the whole.
Thus, forgetting that smart objects need to be in the service of social effects is a surefire way of making stuff that will be popular to a narrow niche, at best. An important lesson in design. Thanks, Liz!
Posted by mikek at February 9, 2005 01:19 PM | TrackBackAw, shucks.
Posted by: egoodman at March 7, 2005 11:12 AM