Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing

Author

Adam Greenfield, American writer and urbanist. He has worked as an information architect in Tokyo, as head of design direction for user interface and service design at Nokia, and as founder of the urban systems practice Urbanscale; he has taught at NYU and the Bartlett. His later books are Against the Smart City (2013) and Radical Technologies (2017).

Publication Details

Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing. Berkeley: New Riders, 2006. 267 pp. ISBN 978-0-321-38401-0.

Description

Greenfield coined "everyware" for the condition in which computing has left the box and entered the fabric of everyday life — embedded in buildings, clothing, streets, objects and bodies, and encountered without any deliberate act of use. The book descends from Mark Weiser's ubiquitous computing programme at PARC, but its temperament is markedly different: where Weiser was optimistic, Greenfield is careful, and the book reads as an argument about what could go wrong while there was still time to decide.

Its structure is unusual and effective: eighty-one short numbered theses, each a page or two, grouped into sections asking what everyware is, how it differs from what came before, what it is for, and what its consequences are. The form makes the argument navigable and quotable, and the book has been used as a design brief more often than as a work of theory.

Key Ideas

• Everyware is not a technology but a condition. It is the aggregate effect of many separate deployments, none of which was designed as part of a whole, which is why nobody is responsible for the result.
• There is no opt-out. A personal computer can be switched off; a networked environment cannot be declined by anyone standing in it. Greenfield's central ethical concern is that everyware makes consent structurally impossible: the person walking down an instrumented street has not agreed to anything and has no interface through which to disagree.
• Encounters are non-elective and often invisible. Because the system does not announce itself, a person may not know they are interacting, which means they cannot form a mental model, cannot detect error, and cannot contest an outcome.
• Failure modes are physical. When computing is embedded in a door, a floor or a vehicle, a software fault is not an inconvenience.
• Greenfield's principles. The book closes with five ethical guidelines for design, of which the most cited are that everyware must default to harmlessness, must be self-disclosing (it should be possible to know what a system is, what it collects and who owns it), and must be deniable — a person must be able to opt out, at any point, and the system must degrade gracefully when they do.

Reception

Everyware has aged into a document about a road not taken. Nearly everything it describes has been deployed; almost none of its five principles has been adopted. Greenfield's own later work, particularly Against the Smart City, is considerably angrier, and treats the smart-city programme as a vendor-driven project whose principal customer is municipal procurement rather than any resident.

Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology

This is the field's clearest statement of the problem of consent in ambient systems. Its self-disclosure and deniability principles remain the most concrete design criteria anyone has proposed for technology that a person cannot choose not to encounter, and they are directly continuous with calm technology — which asks how a system should occupy attention, where Greenfield asks whether it had the right to be there at all.

Related Reading

• Calm Technology
• PARC Research
• Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City
• Envisioning the Ubiquitous City
• Intimations of Everyday Life: Ubiquitous Computing and the City
• Geocloaking