Questioning Invisibility
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Buechley, L. “Questioning Invisibility.” Computer 43.4 (2010): 8486. © Copyright 2010 IEEE
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MC.2010.114
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IN V ISIBL E C OMP U TING
Questioning Invisibility
Leah Buechley, MIT Media Lab
Should invisibility be the guiding design goal for ubiquitous
computing?
A good tool is an invisible tool. By invisible, I mean that the tool does not intrude on your consciousness; you focus on the task,
not the tool.
– Mark Weiser
T
he invisibility of today’s
technology is often a
ble s sing. My laptop
can be used as a word
processor, TV, and stereo without
changing shape, and I’m grateful
that I don’t have to think about transistors, compilers, and operating
systems while I use it. However, is
invisibility always a good thing?
Figure 1. Crashes and errors make the invisible technologies underlying our lives
alarmingly visible.
84
COMPUTER
Published by the IEEE Computer Society
Should it be the guiding design goal
for ubiquitous computing?
WHEN INVISIBILITY FAILS
Benjamin Mako Hill has been
examining instances where the invisibility of technology breaks down.
His website, revealingerrors.com,
documents occasions when a crash
or error makes one of the invisible
technologies underlying our lives
alarmingly visible, forcing us to confront its technological innards. Figure
1 shows a few examples.
The crashed ATM with its exposed
Windows desktop and the GPS system
that locates itself in the ocean are
self-explanatory errors, but the third
example requires some elucidation.
The text at the top of the webpage
should read “Gay eases into 100 final
at Olympic trials,” Gay being the
surname of athlete Tyson Gay. This
strange headline reveals the fact that
the website posting the news feed,
a conservative network called One
News Now, uses a program to adjust
the language of AP news stories. Here
we see that part of their program
replaces instances of the word “gay”
with the word “homosexual.”
Hill argues that such breakdowns
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Figure 2. The LilyPad Arduino toolkit consists of a set of sewable electronic modules that users can stitch together with electrically
conductive thread to make interactive textile-based computers.
aren’t necessarily bad. Though
inconvenient and frustrating, they
can reveal the inelegance, fragility,
and questionable practices behind
technological systems. I can use that
information to make more informed
decisions; I might very well change
banks if I knew more about my favorite ATM’s operating system.
Does this mean we should start
designing error-prone systems? Of
course not. But it does raise a question about the narrow design goal of
invisibility. Systems that vanish into
the background aren’t inherently
good ones. The examples in Figure 1
are troubling demonstrations of some
of the things invisibility can hide.
LEVERAGING VISIBILITY
FOR EDUCATION
The errors documented on Hill’s
website are funny, fascinating, and
enlightening; consequently, they
provide wonderful opportunities for
teaching and learning.
Imagine the curiosity and delight
that an encounter with one of these
broken systems could inspire in a
young person. There are two facets
to this appeal. First, the errors are
engaging—they surprise us and force
us to notice technology we might
have otherwise ignored. Second, they
introduce legibility to technology—
they reveal interesting information
about how it works.
In the research group I direct at
the MIT Media Lab (hlt.media.mit.
edu), we design educational technology that is deliberately engaging and
legible. We exploit these properties
to get students excited about technology. Our particular approach focuses
on using new and unusual physical
materials to create compelling and
comprehensible systems.
For example, during the past several years we have been working
in the emerging field of electronic
textiles, or “e-textiles,” integrating
electronics, computers, and textiles.
We began by tackling a fundamental
engineering challenge: How do you
attach computers to fabric? Once we
had developed robust solutions to this
problem, we focused on making the
domain accessible to students.
The result of our efforts was the
LilyPad Arduino (L. Buechley et al.,
“The LilyPad Arduino: Using Computational Textiles to Investigate
Engagement, Aesthetics, and Diversity
in Computer Science Education,” Proc.
26th Ann. SIGCHI Conf. Human Factors
in Computing Systems, ACM Press,
2008, pp. 423-432). As the leftmost
image in Figure 2 shows, this toolkit
consists of a set of sewable electronic
modules—similar in spirit to Lego
Mindstorm modules—that users can
stitch together with electrically conductive thread to make interactive
textile-based computers.
In a series of courses and workshops, we found that this very visible
new technology could uniquely capture the imagination of teenagers
and teach them the fundamentals of
computer science and electrical engineering. Interestingly, young women
were especially excited about this
blend of textiles and computing. The
other two images in Figure 2 show a
young woman from one of our workshops first constructing and then
modeling her course project, an interactive light-up jacket with an ambient
thermometer.
We’r e now e x p a n d i n g t h i s
approach to another unusual material, paper—exploring how we can
blend paper and paint with computers and electronics. We’ve designed a
paper computing kit that consists of
magnetic sensors, actuators, microcontrollers, and wireless devices;
ferrous paper, to which the modules
stick; and a jar of conductive paint,
which is used to connect the modules across the paper. Students can
use the kit to paint beautiful, functional electronic devices onto paper.
Figure 3 shows images of a prototype kit and a construction example:
an electronic pop-up book built by
Jie Qi, an undergraduate researcher
in our lab.
We’ve just begun to hold workshops
to explore how we might employ this
kit to teach embedded computing (J. Qi
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IN V ISIBL E C OMP U TING
The Living Wall is a flexible ubicomp system. However, it also
functions as a decorative element
in a home. Like the other examples
mentioned here, it wasn’t designed
to be invisible; it elicits and rewards
attention.
I
Figure 3. Paper computing kit. Left: Prototype kit. Right: Electronic popables.
and L. Buechley, “Electronic Popables:
Exploring Paper-Based Computing
through an Interactive Pop-up Book,”
Proc. 4th Int’l Conf. Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction, ACM
Press, pp. 121-128).
Technologies like these—ones that,
at their best, captivate, empower,
and educate people—stand in direct
opposition to ubicomp’s tenet of
invisibility; the kits, and often the
devices constructed with them as
well, are intentionally visible objects
that reveal the inner workings of technology and explicitly require users’
time and attention.
Other researchers have also noted
this conflict between invisibility and
education (M. Eisenberg et al., “Invisibility Considered Harmful: Revisiting
Traditional Principles of Ubiquitous
Computing in the Context of Education,” Proc. 4th IEEE Int’l Workshop
Wireless, Mobile, and Ubiquitous Technology in Education, IEEE CS Press, pp.
103-110; Y. Rogers, “Moving On from
Weiser’s Vision of Calm Computing:
Engaging UbiComp Experiences,”
Proc. 8th Int’l Conf. Ubiquitous Computing, LNCS 4206, Springer, 2006, pp.
404-421).
INVISIBILITY, VISIBILITY,
AND DESIGN
In our lives there are objects we
ignore and objects we treasure. Some
vanish into the background and stay
there and others please, amuse,
86
and comfort us. There are the forgotten paper clips, printers, and
towels, and the beloved dining room
tables, sports uniforms, and jewelry. Why should ubicomp—or any
other computing discipline, for that
matter—consign itself to the ignored,
invisible realm?
Our research group strives to build
systems that fit into people’s aesthetic
and emotional lives as much as their
technological ones. As Figures 2 and 3
suggest, exploring the aesthetic possibilities of technology provides us with
new and unusual ways to excite and
engage students. We also investigate
aesthetic and emotional dimensions
when we develop systems that are
less explicitly educational.
A recent project along these lines
is a unique piece of wallpaper that
we constructed with our paper computing kit. The Living Wall is a flat
surface built out of ferrous paint,
conductive paint, traditional paint,
and electronics to which our paper
computing modules can be attached.
With its wide range of attachable
components, the Living Wall can provide lighting, sense information about
its environment, communicate with
other devices like computers and
phones, and act as a large-scale input
device. The News Brief “Researchers
Build a Wall That Acts Like a Remote
Control” on p. 18 has more information on the system and an illustration
of its use.
nvisibility is a narrow design
goal. It’s not necessarily a bad
one, but it doesn’t capture the
full range of technological or creative
possibilities. If we as computer scientists and engineers only strive to
build invisible systems, we’ll neglect
to build important technology that is
educational, engaging, and beautiful.
We should expand our focus and our
rhetoric.
Leah Buechley is an assistant professor and AT&T Career Development
Professor of Media Arts and Sciences
at MIT Media Lab, where she also
directs the High-Low Tech research
group. Contact her at leah@media.
mit.edu.
Editor: Albrecht Schmidt, Institute for
Computer Science and Business Information
Systems, University of Duisburg-Essen,
Germany; albrecht.schmidt@gmail.com
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