PICNIC07: Fabien Girardin

Some challenges of ubicomp:

1. Invisibility: things may not be immediately apparent and will need signposting.
2. Heterogenity: things need to work together seamlessly.
3. Ownership: users of infrastructure don't own it.
4. Cultural bias: designers add their own bias to designs.
5. Decay: what do we do with old or decommissioned sensors?

One response to these challenges is playfulness:

1. Seamfulness: deliberately exposing the existence of ubicomp sensors, say - e.g. by exposing the range of CCTV cameras to ensure people know where they're being watched.
2. Ambiguity to draw attention or provoke questions about how people experience the environment;
3. Learning from accidents, not just positive perspectives. Better can be worse sometimes.

Conclusion:

1. Technological messiness shouldn't be ignored
2. Little works has been done on this
3. We should understand how malfunctions can be communicated

See also the talk Fabien did at LIFT07