The original articulations of "ubiquitous computing" focus on the
migration of computation and information off the desktop and into the
other spaces of everyday life. Despite this, ubicomp research remains
surprisingly devoid of spatial thinking, taking both "space" and
"information" as natural facts. In our recent work at UCI, we have been
attempting to take the spatial nature of ubicomp seriously. In fact, we
would argue that the advent of ubiquitous computing -- as a
technological fact and a social imaginary -- creates the opportunity to
rethink some fundamental issues in the relationship between computation
and human action.

In this talk, I'll provide an overview of this work, paying particular
attention to the ways in which both information and spatiality emerge as
social and cultural products and to how we are attempting to respond to
these conceptual shifts in our design efforts, particularly in urban
settings, and with a strong focus on aesthetic as well as the
instrumental accounts of urban life.

Biography

Paul Dourish is a Professor of Informatics in the Donald Bren School of
Information and Computer Sciences at UC Irvine; he also holds courtesy
appointments in Computer Science and Anthropology, and teaches in the
interdisciplinary graduate program in Arts Computation Engineering.

His work lies at the intersection of computer science and social
science, and he is known particularly for his research in the areas of
Ubiquitous Computing, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, and
Human-Computer Interaction. His book, "Where the Action Is: The
Foundations of Embodied Interaction" was published by MIT Press in 2001;
it explores how phenomenological accounts of action can provide an
alternative to traditional cognitive analysis for understanding the
embodied experience of interactive and computational systems.