From the RFID tags now embedded in everything from soda cans to the family pet, to smart buildings that subtly adapt to the changing flow of visitors, to gestural interfaces like the ones seen in Minority Report, computing no longer looks much like it used to. Increasingly invisible but present everywhere in our lives, it has moved off the desktop and out into everyday lifeaffecting almost every one of us, whether we're entirely aware of it or not. Author Adam Greenfield calls this ubiquitous computing "everyware." In a uniquely engaging approach to this complex topic, Greenfield explains how such "information processing dissolving in behavior" is reshaping our lives; brief, aphoristic chapters explore the technologies, practices, and innovations that make everyware so powerful and seem so inevitable. If you've ever sensed both the promise of the next computing, and the challenges it represents for all of us, this is the book for you. "Everyware" aims to gives its reader the tools to understand the next computing, and make the kind of wise decisions that will shape its emergence in ways that support the best that is in us.
This book is an attempt to describe the form computing will take in the next few years. Specifically, it's about a vision of processing power so distributed throughout the environment that computers per se effectively disappear. It's about the enormous consequences this disappearance has for the kinds of tasks computers are applied to, for the way we use them, and for what we understand them to be.
Although aspects of this vision have been called a variety of namesubiquitous computing, pervasive computing, physical computing, tangible media, and so onI think of them as facets of one coherent paradigm of interaction that I call everyware.
In everyware, all the information we now look to our phones or Web browsers to provide becomes accessible from just about anywhere, at any time, and is delivered in a manner appropriate to our location and context.
In everyware, the garment, the room and the street become sites of processing and mediation. Household objects from shower stalls to coffee pots are reimagined as places where facts about the world can be gathered, considered, and acted upon. And all the familiar rituals of daily lifethings as fundamental as the way we wake up in the morning, get to work, or shop for our groceriesare remade as an intricate dance of information about ourselves, the state of the external world, and the options available to us at any given moment.
In all of these scenarios, there are powerful informatics underlying the apparent simplicity of the experience, but they never breach the surface of awareness: things Just Work. Interactions with everyware feel natural, spontaneous, human. Ordinary people finally get to benefit from the full power of information technology, without having to absorb the esoteric bodies of knowledge on which it depends. And the sensation of useeven while managing an unceasing and torrential flow of datais one of calm, of relaxed mastery.
This, anyway, is the promise.
