Ubiquitous Computing | Everyone has personal assistants

October 9, 2006

The Future Over the past months, I’ve been doing lots of research about the world of application design, concentrating from a user perspective. My research took me through topics that include social media to interface design to the loved/hated ‘Web 2.0′. There is no question that the amount of momentum and buzz that all these topics are getting is really going to spin off into something bigger than the sum of its parts. A new way of interacting.

One of the books I read recently was Dan Saffer’s book ‘Designing for Interaction : Creating Smart Applications and Clever Devices (Voices that Matter). He spoke of all facets of interaction design and definitely helped to make me understand interaction design not only from a Web standpoint but from all aspects of our lives. (IE. Pill boxes, major street intersections, Starbucks customer flow) It’s all around.

One of the topics I was particularly interested in was the concept of ubiquitous computing. In short, it’s the concept of all items around you are connected. From your car, toaster, IPod, you name it and interacting in one way or another.

I go back and forth on whether a world like that is something I’d thrive in. I would love, love, LOVE to even be able to do basic concepts now like tell my inbox that anytime a ‘you won the lottery’ email came in it would go to the spam folder since my spam filter still won’t learn to catch them. Then, delete my spam for me (since ‘it’ would know I hate having any spam in my email) and then, could answer the standard emails for me and ’star’ the ones I need to really respond to.

It’s like everyone having their very own, free, personal assistant. That’s right, we’re all rock stars! It could book appointments for you, make reservations for dinner, buy movie tickets, pay bills so you can focus on doing what we want to do. I can only imagine the efficient in would allow for in the business world.

There are a few examples of the beginnings of that now with services like Amazon’s ‘if you’d like this, you’d definitely like…’ or Netflix’s recommendation engine. Software is making choices for us and it’s only going to get better, easier and more integrated in our lives. It’ll be interesting.

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