Figuring ubicomp (out)

Abstract

This paper explores ubicomp as a configuration that comprises three key figures: ubiquitous computing as a name and a term, Mark Weiser who came to be identified as the father of ubiquitous computing, and finally the temporalities folded within ubicomp's 'vision'; all three figures tightly interwoven under the phrase, Weiser's vision of ubiquitous computing. By unpacking each figure and exposing the processes that hold ubicomp together, this paper makes visible the frictions and contradictions that ubicomp folds within it, while, at the same time, it attends to the practices that help the whole configuration to circulate, become dominant and productive. The aim is to destabilise and denaturalise the reductive dominance of ubicomp's origin story and attend, instead, to its multiple and messy nature and (hi)stories in order to open up the ways that it can be reconfigured differently.