[Forward from RRE. John]
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From: Phil Agre [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Thursday, December 07, 2000 7:25 PM
To: Red Rock Eater News Service
Subject: [RRE]Contexts of Awareness in Computing
[This is a formal version of my notes about the cell phone etiquette
flap and its consequences for the always-on world, framed as a
theoretical commentary on the prospects for so-called context-aware
computing devices. It might be incomprehensible. I can't tell.]
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Changing Places:
Contexts of Awareness in Computing
Philip E. Agre
Department of Information Studies
University of California, Los Angeles
Los Angeles, California 90095-1520
USA
[log in to unmask]
http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/
Version of 7 December 2000.
This is a draft. Please do not circulate or cite it.
Comments appreciated.
4300 words.
//1 Beyond the mind/body divide
Since their earliest days, the predominant discourses of computing
have reflected the ingrained Western distinction between mind and
body. This Western tradition treats the body, and indeed the whole
non-mental world, as something distant and alien. Descartes, for
example, portrayed the mind and body as continually at war. Babbage
imagined computers as tools for imposing a God-like rational order
on the microcosm of the factory (Schaffer 1994). Turing idealized
the disembodied mind. And Wiener understood cybernetics as a means
of imposing order on a chaotic world (Galison 1994).
To be fair, the mind/body distinction has always had some basis
in technical practicalities. Robot bodies and senses have been
rudimentary, requiring so much controlled regularity in their
environments as to make truly autonomous machines impossible.
Digital communications technologies have likewise been primitive.
It is understandable that the theory and practice of computing have
emphasized internal mental processes and stereotyped interactions
based on simplified text and graphics.
But this is all changing. Miniaturized sensors and actuators are
advancing rapidly, communications networks are becoming ubiquitious,
and standards for wireless networking are being established. Of
particular importance is Bluetooth, an emerging standard for short-
range digital communications. As a philosophical matter, Bluetooth is
important because it initiates communications between devices based on
their physical proximity. Whereas a conventional computer interface
requires the user to have visual and mechanical access to the device,
a Bluetooth-enabled interface is no longer located on the physical
surface of the device. A Bluetooth device can have an "interface"
that interacts with other devices that happen to be nearby, even
though it is embedded in an appliance, a machine, or a wall. And
whereas a conventional wireless device operates by maintaining contact
with a centralized service that locates it in a global coordinate
system, Bluetooth devices interact with one another indexically.
A wireless device might reason, "I am located at (X,Y) and you are
located at (X,Y), and so we must be near one another". A Bluetooth
device, on the other hand, would reason, "we are near one another
(wherever it is we might be), so let's do business". This reasoning
by proximity is useful from a technical perspective because comparing
global coordinates requires a high degree of accuracy and allows
the centralized wireless network to track individual devices (and
thus their owners). By grounding interaction in geographic locality,
Bluetooth invites a style of design thinking that is likewise grounded
in embodied (inter)action.
I want to spell out the consequences of this technical and
philosophical shift for the way we think about the architecture
of the built environment. This effort to rethink architecture, of
course, is not entirely new. Researchers in human-computer interaction
(e.g., Harrison and Dourish 1996) and geography (e.g., Curry 1996)
have long been accustomed to thinking in terms of the concept of
"place", understood as a historically accreted complex of the meanings
and practices, as opposed to "space" as reckoned merely in Cartesian
coordinates. I want to take this analysis further by investigating
the relationship between architecture and human institutions. It
is only when we analyze this relationship, I want to argue, that we
understand what it means for a computer to be aware of its "context".
//2 Artefacts, practices, and institutions
Let us begin with a deceptively simple phenomenon: the cultural flap
over cell phone etiquette. Despite all of the passion it engenders,
cell phone etiquette is only marginally a political issue; the only
serious policy proposals (at least so far) concern the use of cell
phones by drivers. For the most part, public discussion of cell
phone etiquette is simply a matter of collective thinking-out-loud:
mass-mediated griping that creates a reflexively shared awareness
of the issue throughout society. And while the issue of cell phone
etiquette may be comparatively trivial on its own, it portends greater
problems later on.
To see why, consider a simple commonplace event: a cell phone whose
ringing disturbs a performance in a theater. Theaters have always
dealt with noise, such as the coughing of sick people and the
crumpling of candy wrappers. But these disturbances have been
endogenous: they arise from the actions of people who are located
within the physical space of the theater, and who are subject to
the moral order of the place. Theater performances have historically
been resistant to exogenous disruptions, and the theater building is
designed to make such disruptions unlikely. The theater as a building
reflects a set of social relationships: between the players and the
audience, those who have been admitted into the seating areas and
those who have not, the people with the expensive tickets and the
people with the cheap tickets, the bartenders and the intermission
drinkers, and so on. The theater assigns every activity to a place:
dressing in dressing rooms, performing on the stage, watching from
the seats, buying tickets in the lobby, and so on. In fact, the
word "theater" is ambiguous: it refers to the building where plays
areperformed, but it also refers to the institution that defines
all of the social roles (audience, performer, usher, bartender,
ticket clerk) and the activities that go with them. The architecture
itself does not guarantee that everyone behaves themselves according
to their assigned position in the theater's social order, but it
does provide a wide variety of structural resources and constraints
for the socialization process. Everyone plays their part in this
institutional drama, and so the play can get performed.
Cell phones loosen this mapping between activities and places. The
theater as an institution defines a small set of relationships between
people, but a cell phone call can connect a theater-goer to anyone
at all: an employer, a reporter, a dental office administrator, or a
fellow club member, among many others. Each of these relationships
comes with its own repertoire of activities; some of these activities
can be conducted over the telephone, and others can be plotted
beforehand or chewed over afterward. Of course, not every place
restricts its participants as tightly as a theater. A restaurant,
for example, can provide the setting for a business negotiation at
one table and a romance another. Nonetheless, each conversation
in a restaurant is shaped to the sensibilities of the place. Cell
phones, however, shift the basis of social order from the constraints
of the place to the local negotiation of an interactional order that
can be connected to anyone and anything. Parties sitting down to
a restaurant meal, for example, might develop a custom of returning
phone calls before they settle down to conversation.
New technologies of connectivity may push these emerging trends much
further. For all their power, cell phones embody a primitive model of
connectivity: users are interrupted and then connected synchronously.
The connection is all-or-nothing. But other protocols are easy
to imagine, and even current-day technology makes it possible for
people sitting in a restaurant or theater to keep an eye on the ball
scores, the stock prices, and the kids at day care. In these cases,
connectivity is continuous but peripheral. It is also reconfigurable,
as the user selects different channels or display modes. This model
is familiar enough from mass media such as radio and television
playing in the background, but it can also be generalized to any
relationship that can be meaningfully wired. As all of one's
relationships can be continually present, then, divided attention
becomes the rule. The mapping between activities and places will
dissolve, and everyplace will be for everything all the time.
We need an conceptual framework to analyze these phenomena. For
present purposes, three levels will suffice: architecture, practices,
institutions.
* "Architecture" means the built environment (and not the architecture
of computer systems). I will focus on buildings, walls, hallways,
doors, windows, and other fixed structures, but any physical object
is included (kitchen appliances, for example) if it is customarily
confined to a single place.
* "Practices" means the ensemble of embodied routines that a
particular community of people has evolved for doing particular things
in a particular place. On a micro scale these practices might include
the customary greetings and debriefings that a married couple engage
in when they arrive home from work. On a macro scale they might
include a society's ways of attending the theater. The term is
intended to index so-called practice theories of anthropology, for
example Bourdieu (1977) and Ortner (1984).
* "Institutions" are the persistent structures of human
relationships, or put another way the ensemble of social roles and
rules that are constitutive of those relationships (Commons 1924,
Goodin 1996, Knight 1992, March and Olsen 1989, North 1990, Powell and
DiMaggio 1991). Examples of institutions include the medical system,
the research university, marriage, intellectual property, the English
language, the stock market, Halloween, parliamentary procedure, norms
of public politeness, and the rules and conventions of driving on the
highway. Institutions create a categorial framework for practices,
but they do not dictate them. An institution may be thought of as the
playing field over which strategies take form.
These three levels of analysis may be understood as a sandwich.
Architecture and institutions, once established, are relatively
long-lived and impersonal, and they provide the boundary conditions
for the constant negotiation and evolution of practices. Buildings
typically conform to standardized types because of the way they map
the institutions that they house. The theater provides an example:
the institution defines a set of social roles, and the relationships
among these roles are mapped onto the customary structure of the
building. Nearly every building is designed with an institution
in mind: the family home, for example, with its distinction between
the master bedroom and the other bedrooms; or the hospital with its
specialized places for patients, nurses, staff meetings, visitors,
administrators, and maintenance workers. Buildings thus posit
identities -- roles that we live out both subjectively and through
bodily engagement with the people and things of particular architected
places. Hospitals make us into patients, courtrooms into jurors,
restaurants into diners, and so on. This linkage among institutions,
architecture, and identity is what Foucault means by power, and
it stands to reason that most social practices have been heavily
constrained by the architectures and institutions between which they
are pinned.
To be sure, architecture is not completely immutable. Buildings do
evolve to some degree through the impact of the activities within them
(Brand 1994). Some building types are designed to be reconfigured;
a hotel ballroom, for example, can be partitioned to house parallel
tracks of an engineering conference, and then the partitions can be
removed and the decorations changed to house a high school prom in the
evening. The same space is made to support different institutions at
different times; in doing so, it arguably becomes a different place.
But this is the exception.
New technologies complicate this picture. If institutions and
architectures have historically been clamped together, imposing
a strict mapping between activities and places, now the clamps are
slipping. Institutions are less tied to places and activities are
becoming more fluid. New technologies of continual presence allow
any institution to structure activity in any place, and so activity
increasingly requires its participants to negotiate the cross-cutting
demands of their various institutional involvements. For example,
mobile payment technologies bring the institutions of banking and
commerce to every place. Wearable medical devices with wireless
data links liberate the institutions of medicine from the clinic so
that patients can maintain constant, real-time relationships with
the medical system wherever they go. In a striking image, Perelman
(1992) calls for networked learning activities to be built into every
artifact. Family members can stay in constant touch during the day,
and extended families can remain continually aware of one another
despite being geographically spread out. Each institutionally
organized relationship acquires an increasingly complex informational
structure, and Poster (1990) observes that the databases that capture
this information have the potential to bind individuals even more
tightly into their institutional roles. Yet at the same time, the
pervasive cross-cutting of institutions also tangles the lines of
power, creating a complicated landscape of everyday practice that the
culture has only begun to explore.
This strange new landscape will presumably have consequences for the
distribution of activities in space, as well as for the structures
of both architectures and institutions. Sassen (1991), for example,
argues that new information and communication technologies loosen
the bonds that have connected finance people to their investments,
thus freeing them to move to global financial centers such as New
York to engage in the face-to-face negotiations that complex new forms
of finance make both necessary and possible. These technologies also
allow financial organizations to shift their back-office operations
to lower-cost regions of the world. As a result, world cities such
as New York increasingly consist of financial people and the support
services, such as restaurants and cultural activities, that require
physical proximity to the people they support.
Mitchell (1999) generalizes this argument, observing that new
technologies loosen a wide variety of bonds. The result, in most
cases, is not that individuals float free of all spatial attachments.
Some bonds remain, and these remaining bonds increasingly
determine the geographic distribution of activities. Mitchell thus
optimistically predicts that the electronic weakening of bonds between
individuals and their workplaces will bring a return to mixed-use
urban areas, whose lifestyle advantages create bonds of their own.
At the same time, the category of place has a deeper institutional
significance than these reckonings of bond-strengths can capture.
Burkean conservatism, for example, is the apotheosis of the assignment
of people to places, and it is entirely unclear whether the dynamism
of the always-on world is compatible with the institutional rigidity
that a resurgence of conservative culture would entail.
//3 Activities and places
What consequences does the loosened mapping between activity and place
hold for the design of context-aware digital devices (Dey, Salber, and
Abowd in press)? For simplicity, let us suppose that every device is
attached either to person -- whether worn or carried -- or to a place
-- whether embedded in the walls or simply kept in a certain locality
(Rhodes, Minar, and Weaver 1999). In the most general case, all of
the devices that happen to be located in a given place at a given
moment will interact both with one another and, over the Internet,
with devices in other places. Faced with all of these many types
of potential connectivities, it is a challenge even to define what
"context" could mean. If "context" means "place", for example, then
a place might have "house rules" that limit the potential range of
functionality of devices that are located within in. A theater, for
example, might compel all cell phones (and other devices) to shut off
their ringers. An airplane might compel whole categories of devices
to shut themselves off once it pushes back from the gate. At least
one device to enforce such rules on Bluetooth-enabled devices is
already on the market. [Footnote: Bluelinx
<http://www.bluelinx.com/products.htm>.]
For most purposes, however, "context" must be reckoned in both
architectural and institutional terms. It matters, for example,
whether a place is a restaurant or a theater, since the activities
that occur in those places have a completely different categorical
structure. For example, one might imagine a portable Bluetooth device
that, having sensed that it is located in a restaurant, activates the
interactional repertoire that is suited to restaurants. Having then
detected a Bluetooth-enabled menu, it might inform the menu of its
owner's dietary restrictions, and the menu might reconfigure itself
dynamically to display only those dishes (and variations on dishes)
that fit the constraints. Finding itself in a movie theater, this
same device might enable payment protocols that activate when the
individual passes through a certain turnstile.
But even these applications presuppose the traditional strict mapping
between architectures and institutions. A "place" is still to be
reckoned by the set of institution-specific rules that operate there.
At another extreme are devices whose operation, while deeply embedded
in the workings of a particular institution, is wholly independent
of particular places. Examples include wearable medical monitors
or portable stock trading devices, or services that monitor a digital
library for new publications by the user's professional colleagues.
These devices need not be aware of place, but they exist to maintain
awareness of other, non-spatial aspects of context -- aspects that are
defined by the institution. Examples of relevant institutional facts
might include the ownership of a stock or a theater ticket, having
been placed in the care of a particular doctor, being responsible for
particular items of workflow, being selected for a sales pitch, or
having a house in escrow. These institutional elements of context can
affect the significance of events and conditions in a wide range of
places.
Context, then, has two aspects, architectural and institutional,
that may be coupled to various degrees. A continuum emerges. At
one end are those applications for which the coupling is very strong,
so that architecture and institution map strongly to one another.
These applications are strongly coupled to a particular place, and a
device can register certain aspects of its context simply by knowing
where it is. Dey, Salber, and Abowd (in press) give the example of a
device that supports conference-goers by figuring out which talk they
are attending; this is possible because of the schedule, presumably
online, that maps rooms and times to talks. At the other end of the
spectrum are those applications which depend only on the architectural
context or (more commonly) the institutional context. Examples,
such as the wearable medical monitor, have been provided above.
Between these extremes is a largely unmapped space of possibilities:
institutionally organized activities that are loosely coupled to
places. And it is in this middle ground that context-awareness
becomes most crucial and most complicated. Examples would
include activities that, while strongly coupled to the information
infrastructure of an organization, can automatically adapt themselves
to the resources -- scientific instruments, display screens, printers,
automobiles -- that happen to be available in particular places.
As the mappings between institutions and architectures break down,
this middle ground of loosely coupled activities will surely expand.
Physical places and things will become more plastic, and thus
more capable of playing roles in a wide variety of institutionally
organized activities. Space does not permit detailed prognostication,
which would probably be impossible anyway.
//4 The problem of structure
For all its complexity, this analysis does not adequately explain
the relation between context and activity. "Context" is such an
all-embracing term that it is easy to underestimate the problem of
designing a computational device that could be "aware" of it. Some
aspects of context are simple ambient parameters of physics -- such
as temperature or noise levels -- and in these cases the matter is not
so difficult. Most aspects of context, however, are defined to some
extent by the institutions that structure both the ongoing activity
and the social relations within which the activity is embedded. For
example, a device that is supposed to help people conduct a meeting
needs to know the participants in the meeting (as opposed to people
who happen to be nearby for other reasons), whether the meeting has
begun (as opposed to the smalltalk that precedes the transition to
formal meeting mode), which agenda items are being discussed (even
though participants may parenthetically anticipate an item or refer
backward to one already officially completed), and other categories
that are defined by the prevailing rules of order. These are all
institutional entities -- without the institution of a meeting they
would not exist -- and they are constructed through the moment-to-
moment interactional work of the people in the room. A device that
cannot participate in this work will be incapable of registering the
most basic aspects of "context" in the ongoing meeting, and yet the
very nature of the work is poorly understood. This is the key insight
of ethnomethodology (Suchman 1987), and it is a strong constraint on
the design of context-aware devices.
The main tradition of computer system design, however, has a solution
to this problem: restructure the activity itself in such a way that
the computer can capture the relevant aspects of it. This design
methodology, which I have called the "capture model" (Agre 1994), has
five stages:
* Analysis. A systems analyst studies an existing form of activity
and reduces it to a repertoire of atomic elements -- entities to be
represented in a database, institutionally meaningful actions that
affect the existence and attributes of these entities, and so on.
(See, for example, Whitten and Bentley 1998.)
* Articulation. The analyst goes on to devise a grammar that can
generate, and thus represent, all of the institutionally permitted
sequences of action. This grammar might draw upon the explicit or
tacit rules of the activity, but it is a formal construct in precisely
the sense of formal language theory (Chomsky 1965).
* Imposition. The resulting grammar is introduced into the everyday
life of the institution and given a normative force. The people who
engage in the activity are somehow induced or obligated to organize
their actions in a way that can be "parsed" in terms of the grammar.
For example, an organization might introduce step-by-step procedures
or construct physical barriers such as hallways that channel people
from one place to another in a prescribed order.
* Instrumentation. Social and technical mechanisms are installed
that parse the activity, whether in real time or in retropect.
This phase may coincide with the imposition phase, or it may follow
much later. An example would be the introduction of double-entry
bookkeeping, which imposes a grammar upon the handling of money and
requires that accounting books record each transaction in a way that
can be audited later. Instrumenting is straightforward when the
activity is conducted through electronic mediation, as for example in
computer supported cooperative work (Greenberg 1991).
* Elaboration. As the captured activity records accumulate, they
can now be used for a wide variety of purposes, both good and bad.
Examples include surveillance, marketing, publishing, giving advice,
evaluating performance, and controlling quality.
The capture model provides a method for integrating computer systems
into social systems, but in doing so it exacts a price. Participants
in a newly instrumented activity may find themselves filing paperwork,
scanning bar codes, swiping cards through magnetic card readers,
or communicating in controlled vocabularies. The participants may
balk, or the overhead of data entry may degrade their performance,
or the system might be used in a superficial way. In practice the
designer faces a trade-off: the more structure a system imposes,
the more functionality it can provide; but the capture of structured
information imposes costs of its own. For example, a system for
capturing design rationales (Moran and Carroll 1996) can err by
requiring designers to analyze their rationales into such fine-grained
units that the design process is slowed by the effort of formulating
and entering it all.
The trade-offs inherent in the capture model are a central challenge
for the design of context-aware systems. Designers must choose among
three unpalatable options:
(1) confine the system to registering those few aspects of context
that are not defined in institutional terms,
(2) perform the social engineering necessary to impose a fine-grained
grammar on the activity and its participants, or
(3) reject the capture model, and instead register variables that can
serve as a rough, heuristic (and therefore fallible) proxies for the
institutional variables that are the real objects of interest.
Option (3) is especially common in the literature on context-aware
systems, and it bears special consideration. The situation is
not entirely bleak: registering the context heuristically can be
a reasonable design choice, for example, when the consequences
of error are slight. Consider the case of a system that displays
evolving selections of information for the curiosity of passers-by
(Sawhney, Wheeler and Schmandt 2000). Such a system can guess at the
interests of individuals who might be nearby, but if it is designed
conservatively enough then poor guesses will cause no harm except
to the long-term reputation of the system itself. The drawbacks of
such a scheme become clear, however, as soon as users wish to exert
control over the system's choices. Precisely because no grammar
of action has been imposed on the users' engagement with the system,
the heuristic nature of the contextual data violates the user illusion
(Kay 1990: 199). Users may be found tricking the system by simulating
the contextual cues that trigger the desired effects. In general,
as soon as a context-aware system's choices become significant, the
fallibility of its context cues will become problematic for users.
Tools for meeting support, for example, will probably fail annoyingly
if they are made to guess at socially constructed events such as the
start of the meeting or the transition from one agenda item to the
next.
//5 Conclusion
The picture that emerges from this analysis is complicated and not
especially optimistic. Context-aware systems will increasingly
be used in activities that fall in two netherworlds: the loosened
coupling between activity and the built environment and the outer
limits of the trade-off that is inherent in the capture model. The
always-on world allows every institution and every relationship to be
continually present in every place, but precisely for that reason the
very concept of place is going to change. Traditional places created
strong expectations about the structure of activity. Those strong
expectations were often bad, of course, because they foreclosed
options that are now opening up. But they were also good, because
they made life simpler. Life is going to be complicated now, and a
central task for design will be to make sense of it.
//* References
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end
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