One of the first thoughts I had about history was how difficult it was to truly understand the time spans that are referenced. Hundreds, thousands, and millions of years are not easy to get a gist of. There’s a certain subset of time that we can truly relate to–probably between several seconds and year or two.  Anything else is just a mental representation of what we are dealing with.

In any case, I think historical timelines area really inadequet, and instead of years they should use something that we can understand a little better on an intuitive level. We can understand human generations pretty well, and have a natural sense of the time involved in a person’s liftime in relation to their children’s, and it would be nice to show historical events in those terms.

Luckily, I found someone else who had the same idea:

Dan Roam is some sort of visualizer extraordinaire. He put out a book, and visited Carnegie Mellon while I was there–sadly I wasn’t able to make it to his talk. His work looks interesting, but I’m not sure about the whole napkin think. I think the idea is that it’s important to recognize that visualizing is useful even in extremely low fidelity. The value really comes in communicating an idea, making something understandable, and ultimately being a tool for stimulating discussion.

My question is then not what is it, but why is it? I feel like interaction design as we learn it at school is the most appropriate way to approach this topic. Why do we feel the need to talk about ubicomp as something distinct? Essentially interaction designers are working on these small pieces of information technology (and yes, products in general) that are addressing people’s needs regardless of the overarching organization of coherent ubiquitous system. This is interesting because the discussion is no longer about the speculations and possibilities and is more about a bottom-up approach to designing this future.

So who is designing the now and future of computing anyway? Is it the humanistic designers who empathize with people’s needs? Is it large corporations who have enough money to deploy infrastructure only when it’s convenient for them? Or is it DIY hackers who aggressively subvert these companies, organize, and create ad-hoc networks of their own?  Maybe it’s everyone. The healthy(hopefully) interplay between all these different might have the potential to scrap together new ways that we will use technology as a resource.

As I’m investigating, I came across a great post that references an old paper that questions ubicomp. Perfect timing.