A reader of this blog recently asked me if I had tips about relevant paper to read concerning Ubiquitous Computing that has been released in the last 2 years...I made a quick list of the ones I found really interesting lately and that I rely on when doing presentations about critical overviews of that topic. One might wonder why they all have similar authors... it's definitely that there is some coherent thoughts in Paul Dourish's writings that echoes with my feelings. And of course, it's only 4-5 papers among a ocean of thoughts concerning ubicomp but those are the ones that I liked lately. No exhaustivity hre
Greenfield, A: (2006). Everyware: The dawning age of ubiquitous computing. Adam's book is a good overview of issues regarding the user experience of ubicomp, plus it gives a good primer that can leads to lots of papers on the topic. Have a look at the bibliography.
Bell, G. & Dourish, P. (2007). Yesterday’s tomorrows: notes on ubiquitous computing’s dominant vision, Personal and Ubiquitous Computing 11:133-143. This one gives a good critical vision of how "ubicomp of the future" is yet to be seen (because of issues such as difficulty to have seamless infrastructures) and a "ubicomp of the present" vision should be promoted (for example by looking at Korean broadband infrastructures/practices or highway system in Singapore).
Dourish, P. & Bell, G. (2007). The Infrastructure of Experience and the Experience of Infrastructure: Meaning and Structure in Everyday Encounters with Space. Environment and Planning B, Great food for thoughts about how infrastructures are important in ubicomp and how things are not simple when we think about space and ubicomp.
Williams, A., Kabisch, E., and Dourish, P. (2005). From Interaction to Participation: Configuring Space through Embodied Interaction. In proceedings of the International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp 2005) (Tokyo, Japan, September 11-14), 287-304. What I liked in this paper is that the authors showed how space is not as smooth as expected by engineers and designers ("space is not a container"), showing how history and culture can shape our environment. Projects and applications are indeed relying on a narrow vision of city, mobility or spatial issues that take space as a generic concept.
Dourish, P., Anderson, K., & Nafus, D. (2007) Cultural Mobilities: Diversity and Agency in Urban Computing, Proc. IFIP Conf. Human-Computer Interaction INTERACT 2007 (Rio De Janiero, Brazil). Here the authors argues for investigating people’s practices, which can help understanding the complexity of how space is experienced, how mobility takes many forms or how movement in space is not only going from A to B or how mobility can take many forms.
Chalmers, M. and Galani, A. (2004): Seamful interweaving: heterogeneity in the theory and design of interactive systems, Proceedings of the 2004 Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS 2004), Cambridge, USA, pp. 243-252. A paper about seamful design, i.e. how the environmental and technical seams can be used as designed opportunities and reflected to the users.