Invisible Computing

The computer is no longer a tool solely used for enhancing the productivity of organizational tasks. Rather, computing capability now is embedded into our everyday artifacts, enabling our daily activities to become smarter and easier. As a result, the way we interact with computers has radically changed in the past few years: computing is now being designed for activity-oriented users. Thus, as IS and HCI scholars have discussed, computing should be designed to be invisible. By invisible we mean the phenomenon that users are not conscious of the computing that they are using. The degree of invisibility largely depends on user interfaces of computing. The concept of invisibility has been used among IS and HCI scholars. However, detailed analysis on invisibility as a construct has not been conducted. Therefore, in this paper, we will investigate 1) where and how the concept of invisibility has been used in the literature, 2) a new theoretical framework for the concept of invisibility in computing, and 3) how this concept can provide practical implications by applying it to a related case. In this paper, we focus on the relation between computing devices and users at the individual level with respect to degrees of invisibility.