Ubiquitous computing is unusual amongst technological research arenas. Most areas of computer science research, such as programming language implementation, distributed operating system design, or denotational semantics, are defined largely by technical problems, and driven by building upon and elaborating a body of past results. Ubiquitous computing, by contrast, encompasses a wide range of disparate technological areas brought together by a focus upon a common vision. It is driven, then, not so much by the problems of the past but by the possibilities of the future. Ubiquitous computing's vision, however, is over a decade old at this point, and we now inhabit the future imagined by its pioneers. The future, though, may not have worked out as the field collectively imagined. In this article, we explore the vision that has driven the ubiquitous computing research agenda and the contemporary practice that has emerged. Drawing on crosscultural investigations of technology adoption, we argue for developing a ''ubicomp of the present'' which takes the messiness of everyday life as a central theme.

Although the current developments in ubiquitous and pervasive computing are driven largely by technological opportunities, they have radical implications not just for technology design but also for the ways in which we experience and interact with computation. In particular, the move of computation ‘off the desktop’ and into the world, whether embedded in the environment around us or carried or worn on our bodies, suggests that computation is beginning to manifest itself in new ways as an aspect of the everyday environment. One particularly interesting issue in this transformation is the move from a concern with virtual spaces to a concern with physical ones. Basically, once computation moves off the desktop, computer science suddenly has to be concerned with where it might have gone. Whereas computer science and human-computer interaction have previously been concerned with disembodied cognition, they must now look more directly at embodied action and bodily encounters between people and technology. In this paper, we explore some of the implications of the development of ubiquitous computing for encounters with space. We look on space here as infrastructure—not just a technological infrastructure, but an infrastructure through which we experience the world. Drawing on studies of both the practical organization of space and the cultural organization of space, we begin to explore the ways in which ubiquitous computing may condition, and be conditioned by, the social organization of everyday space.

LACKING OTHER criteria, we make judgments based on our own culture, values, and experience. The trouble is this narrow point of view isn't effective in the global marketplace. Design ethnography extends the cultural panorama. Illustrating this strategy and trying to decipher its implications for developing products and services, Tony Salvador, Genevieve Bell, and Ken Anderson ponder the relationships between the American family room and the Italian kitchen table, between food shopping and the importance of friendship.

Over the last decade, new information and communication technologies have lived a secret life. For individuals and institutions around the world, this constellation of mobile phones, personal computers, the internet, software, games, and other computing objects have supported a complex set of religious and spiritual needs. In this paper, I offer a survey of emerging and emergent techno-spiritual practices, and the anxieties surrounding their uptake. I am interested in particular in the ways in which religious uses of technology represent not only a critique of dominant visions of technology's futures, but also suggest a very different path(s) for ubiquitous computing's technology envisioning and development.am casting ICTs broadly to include personal computers, public computing sites (i.e.: cyber cafes, web-kiosks and gaming arcades), the Internet, software, games, accessories and gadgets (i.e.: USB flash keys, etc), mobile phones, other wireless devices and the various infrastructures that support them. And indeed recent surveys of internet habits, corporate marketing strategies, and new product developments, all point to the fact that there is a growing (perhaps already grown) segment of the population that uses technology to support religious practices, what I am calling "techno-spiritual practices". Some of these techno-spiritual re-purposings have been documented [2-8], some have been theorized [9-15], and some have been playfully and thoughtfully explored and elaborated [16][17][18], and there is certainly a growing literature about the impact of new technologies on Islamic practice [19][20][21][22][23], and wellrehearsed arguments on technological avoidances and resistances in certain religious communities [24][25]. For the most part, however, religious or spiritual relationships to, and usages of, ICTs seem to be marginalized to the realm of technological oddities, fodder for cheeky web logs and the occasional appearance in the pages of the New York Times or Wired, written off as just another trend.However, it is my contention that these examples of the ways in which new technologies are delivering religious experiences represent the leading edge of a much larger re-purposing of the internet in particular, and of computational technologies more broadly, that has been underway for some time. Furthermore, as I have argued elsewhere [26] that ubicomp's frame of reference should extend to include any ICT that has a ubiquitous presence, this re-purposing could also be a subject of regular discussion or activities, developments and deployments in the ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) community. These techno-spiritual re-purposings are important for the ways in which they highlight alternate paradigms for technology creation, deployment, consumption and resistance, as well as pointing to different communities, practices and habits that could be supported. Furthermore, these repurposings seems to be of critical importance as the realm of technological infrastructure extends progressively beyond the office, into the ...

Abstract. Design-oriented research is an act of collective imagining -a way in which we work together to bring about a future that lies slightly out of our grasp. In this paper, we examine the collective imagining of ubiquitous computing by bringing it into alignment with a related phenomenon, science fiction, in particular as imagined by a series of shows that form part of the cultural backdrop for many members of the research community. A comparative reading of these fictional narratives highlights a series of themes that are also implicit in the research literature. We argue both that these themes are important considerations in the shaping of technological design, and that an attention to the tropes of popular culture holds methodological value for ubiquitous computing.