1 Supporting the Unremarkable : Experiences with the Obje Display Mirror

Many believe that ubiquitous computing will succeed when it has faded into the background of everyday life and work—that is, when it has become mundane. This paper examines the potential for technology to enhance users’ experience of their environments through the improvement of the unremarkable activities that comprise everyday experience. Based on a 6-month longitudinal study, we describe how we designed, deployed, and evaluated technology to support and enhance a common but unremarkable practice: the act of connecting a portable computer to a shared display (e.g. VGA projector). We found that new capabilities of our technology introduced subtle but significant changes in the practices surrounding the sharing of information in meetings. However, we also met with substantial challenges in terms of deployment, adoption, and evaluation. We analyze and discuss these challenges in depth, in order to inform the design of future mundane, pervasive applications. INTRODUCTION In their paper “Unremarkable Computing,” Tolmie, et al. encouraged designers of ubiquitous computing technology to investigate “unremarkable computing” [26]— the use of computing to support the mundane, everyday routines of life. This agenda lines up with the original vision of ubiquitous and calm computing as expressed by Mark Weiser [28] and refined via ideas like “everyday” [19] and “ambient” [30] computing that have driven much research over the past several years. This agenda follows on a broader methodological and theoretical agenda from the social sciences. Ethnomethodology [9] alerts us to the importance of studying the “detailed and observable practices that make up the incarnate production of ordinary social facts” [15]. These “ethnomethods” are, by definition, mundane and invisible (which is why they require such detailed observation to be uncovered or, alternatively, some form of “breaching experiment” to foreground them). Yet they are the foundations of the orderly functioning of society. Along the same lines, Suchman’s influential book Plans And Situated Actions [25] emphasized the situated nature of human activity, and the importance of the context surrounding any instance of technology use. This context is, at first sight, also mundane and invisible. Thorough studies of, for instance, a person’s work environment, are meant to reveal its effects. In this paper we describe our attempts at studying, designing, and deploying ubiquitous computing technology specifically meant to support mundane practices. There are two sides to the mundane that are important for systems designers. On the one hand, achieving mundanity is a goal we have for much of the technology we design—we hope that our systems will eventually integrate so well into our users’ lives that they will become ordinary and commonplace. At the same time, mundanity can be seen as a topic for investigation in the design of ubicomp technologies. In this latter case, we set out to understand, support, and improve activities that have already become mundane. In this paper, we hope to shed light on this latter, less studied aspect of the relationship between technology and the mundane. To illustrate our focus on the application of ubicomp technologies to the mundane, we report on the design