Adam Greenfield’s reflections on Everyware

I love Adam Greenfield’s reflections on his first book Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing. Adam wrote Everyware in 2006, and this interview, Towards a Newer Urbanism: Talking Cities, Networks, and Publics with Adam Greenfield, with Tish Shute was conducted in 2009. 

“So, first, I think it’s important to cop to all the places in Everyware where I just outright got things wrong. There’s a passage in Thesis 50, for example, where I unaccountably mock the idea that “the mobile phone…will do splendidly as a mediating artifact for the delivery of [ubiquitous] services.” OK, this was admittedly written in a pre-iPhone world – and was correct for that world – but you can really see my parochialism showing here. It took the iPhone to make the proposition as blazingly self-evident to me in North America as it had been for quite some time to folks in Europe and Asia.

Having said that, though, I think I’m justified in taking a little pride in what the book got right. The broader trends the book set out to discuss – the colonization of everyday life by information processing – well, take a good look around you. And so one of the points of departure for the new book is taking everything posited in Everyware as a given: the urban environment, and most everything in it as well, has been provisioned with the kind of abilities you mention. So what now?

How do you go about designing informatic systems so they don’t undermine the wonderful things about cities? How do you design cities so they can incorporate networked informatics to greatest advantage? How, especially, do you accomplish these things when the disciplinary communities involved barely speak the same language? And how do you keep everyone’s eyes on the prize, which is the ordinary human being asked to make sense of these new propositions? These are the questions The City Is Here For You To Use sets out to address.”

picture credit: from Dan Lockton’s wonderful review of Everyware