Adam Greenfield is a noted user experience designer and futurist who’s worked for large and small clients around the globe; heck, he even has a decent-size biographical article in Wikipedia. I mention all this just to establish credentials.
Earlier this year Greenfield published Everyware, his first book, a manifesto to raise awareness among designers of the issues which should be accounted for as their products increasingly become part of the ubiquitous computing environment that even now is emerging. Structured as a set of 81 theses, Adam works his way through from a statement of concerns, definitions and history, conditions, opportunities, assertions of appropriate underlying principles and, finally, a warning of the challenges “ubicomp” poses to all of us if those involved in bringing the technologies to market do so blindly and disconnected.
It’s not a long book and many of the theses are four pages are less but, as one Amazon reviewer wrote, “I have to stop and think. And think. And daydream. And read a passage over again, and dream a little more.” Because the topic addressed is truly profound and far-reaching: Everyware is Greenfield’s name for the emerging aspect of our modern age, that computing power has become so cheap and useful that every product is, or soon will be, designed to incorporate.
But not just that everything will have some computing power; that all these things will be connected through pervasive networking. You can see simple examples today in the RFID tags Wal-Mart requires its suppliers to attach to all shipments, in Internet-connected refrigerators and TiVos, in greeting cards that allow one to record a message that’s played when the recipient opens the card.
True story: As I was almost finished reading I had a checkup with my doctor. He saw the book, asked what it was about and, after I told him, mentioned that his catalogs are starting to include products (like blood pressure cuffs and thermometers, I guess) which have a wireless option to automatically send measurements to patient records.
Adam’s book is targeted to designers but you should understand that he includes in that group everyone who works for companies that make these products. Not just the people who design the physical appearance or specify the internal workings but marketers, executives and all those who have a say in what gets made and how. Seems reasonable to me, especially given the current political and business environment where almost any information that can be collected is collected and then aggregated and analyzed by whoever can make a case for getting their hands on the data.
recommended
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