Doors of Perception The design challenge of pervasive computing
"What happens to society when there are hundreds of microchips for every man, woman and child on the planet? What cultural consequences follow when every object around us is 'smart', and connected? And what happens psychologically when you step into the garden to look at the flowers - and the flowers look at you?"

"The signs of such a change are there for all to see. Enlightened managers and entrepreneurs understand, nowadays, that the best way to navigate a complex world is through a focus on core values, not on chasing the latest killer app. (This picture illustrates the core values of the French train company, SNCF). Business magazines are full of talk about a transition from transactions, to to a focus on relationship. We are moving from business strategies based on the domination of markets, to the cultivation of communities. The best companies are focussing more on the innovation of new services, and new business models, than on new technology per se. They are striving to change relationships, to anticpate limts, to accelerate trends." [via idvilla]

redux [04.13.00]
The New York Times A Chip in Every Pot
[requires 'free' registration]
"Russell Robertson was grappling with an unusual assignment.

As an industrial designer, his mission was to figure out how kitchen appliances will be designed when, as he put it, "the fridge talks to the coffee pot."

His eyes twinkled as he spoke, but he was not kidding about the basic concept. In fact, while the idea may have once sounded ridiculous, predictions of the advent of such devices are now becoming almost clichéd."

"But predicting whether a technology will be adopted is critical for companies that want to succeed, or even survive, in the marketplace. The ones that can figure out what will be deemed useful, superfluous or downright ridiculous will win. And today, as tiny, wireless computer systems are being perfected and the Internet is allowing the distribution of data in seconds, dozens of appliance manufacturers are betting that some sort of pervasive-computing devices will come to be considered as necessary as a telephone. The trick, for them, is to figure out which ones."

""But one of the main reasons that companies with new products stumble, Professor Utterback said, "is that they fail to appreciate or investigate the marketplace." Many companies simply ask, "What can we do with the technology?" And once they determine what they can do, he said, they assume that people will want it."

IBM Systems Journal At what cost pervasive? A social computing view of mobile computing systems
"With the advent of pervasive systems, computers are becoming a larger part of our social lives than ever before. Depending on the design of these systems, they may either promote or inhibit social relationships. We consider four kinds of social relationships: a relationship with the system, system-mediated collaborative relationships, relationships with a community, and interpersonal relationships among co-located persons. In laboratory studies, the design of pervasive computers is shown to affect responses to social partners. We propose a model of how pervasive systems can influence human behavior, social attributions, and interaction outcomes. We also discuss some implications for system design. "

Hive Distributed Agents for Networking Things
"Hive is a distributed agents platform, a decentralized system for building applications by networking local system resources. This paper presents the architecture of Hive, concentrating on the idea of an ``ecology of distributed agents'' and its implementation in a practical Java based system. Hive provides ad-hoc agent interaction, ontologies of agent capabilities, mobile agents, and a graphical interface to the distributed system. We are applying Hive to the problems of networking ``Things That Think,'' putting computation and communication in everyday places such as your shoes, your kitchen, or your own body. TTT shares the challenges and potentials of ubiquitous computing and embedded network applications. We have found that the flexibility of a distributed agents architecture is well suited for this application domain, enabling us to easily build applications and to reconfigure our systems on the fly. Hive enables us to make our environment and network more alive."