Mark Weiser’s Quest for Calm Computing

I never cried before when I read a book about computers and their creators, but this time I did. Mark Weiser's death from cancer in 1996 was both sad and tragic, but he imbued his last few weeks with meaning by making a choice demonstrating what his life's philosophy had been all about, to be present and engaged with his fellow human beings, in particular his family, friends, and colleagues. When he was diagnosed with cancer and told that he had only three weeks to live, his first thought was to isolate himself and write the book he had always dreamt of writing, laying out his philosophy behind ubiquitous computing, an approach to computing that wanted to get them out of the way, so that they didn’t become a distraction from our humanity and human social life, but in the end he decided to spend the time with his ex-wife, daughters and friends. On the brink of death, he chose to be present.

The Philosopher of Palo Alto, written by John Tinnell, director of digital studies and associate professor of English at the University of Colorado at Denver, captures Mark Weiser's long struggle to keep the exploding new information technology from overwhelming us as humans. 

Wherever you look in 2023 it seems that he lost his battle as parents and children, friends and lovers, stare down at the mobile phones to count Facebook likes or laugh at Tik-Tok videos rather than look at each other, talk and listen. But the battle is not over, and Mark Weiser's ideas are still simmering and nurturing many information technology developers, researchers, and critics.

It was at Xerox PARC's legendary research lab that Mark Weiser developed the concept of ubiquitous computing, a radical paradigm for what computers could and should do, as well as what they should not do. He was influenced by philosophers such as Michael Polanyi, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, an influence that made him question the impact on computer research and development of the Cartesian split of mind and body. 

I interviewed Mark Weiser at his Computer Science Lab in early 1992, and he immediately made a strong impression on me, and I would never forget his basic ideas infused with humanity as they were. Half-way into the book Tinnell writes about Mark Weiser's visit to the MIT Media Lab where he was going to challenge the rest of the panel, which included the Lab's founder Nicholas Negroponte who touted software “butlers” that knew what their master’s wanted. It is a dramatic moment as he took on the more well-known and established digiterati. At this point, I found myself quoted in the book. 

"Weiser, meanwhile, sporting a rare tie and his trademark red suspenders, waited for his turn to address the crowd, aware that the other speakers were likely aligned against him. Weiser had picked fights with a few of them in his interview with reporters over the summer. Most pointedly, for example, he told a Swedish technology magazine shortly before the symposium: ‘I feel sick when I hear Alan Kay, Apple's research guru, talk of intimate data processing as the next step. Computers are a part of my life, like paper, pens, and chairs, but I don't want to become 'intimate' with them.’" (A footnote points to my 1992 article in Datateknik. John Tinnell, The Philosopher of Palo Alto, University of Chicago Press, 2023, p 156)

This was a time when the computer world was centered around personal computers or workstations, linked by local area networks, and maybe networks connected to universities, corporations, or government agencies. Lacking such a connection, you relied on CompuServe and America On-Line to get access to their respective and separate online worlds. It was before WWW, laptops, tablets, and smartphones, and a time when many industry players thought television would be the center of the connected and interactive home.

The book continues by exploring how the computer lab tried to move beyond the initial success for the concept of ubiquitous computing by collaborating with Xerox PARC’s inhouse anthropologists. Despite serious attempts on both sides, the two groups never quite connected since they had very different cultures and perspectives. Maybe one could say that it was a collision between anthropological fieldwork and engineers sprouting ideas in their labs. The problem for the engineers was that they must build the prototypes of ubiquitous computing with a technology that had a long way to go before it could be viable. During my visit, I was shown the three key components that illustrated the concept – tabs, pads, and boards, that is small, handheld devices with limited but context-aware functionality, electronic notepads, and finally a large electronic whiteboard. They were all connected through a primitive network that still enabled the user to pick up his work on a pad in another room or an electronic board, provided he had brought his tab with him. A fourth element in this model was a badge, that worked as an electronic ID-card, which could open doors and signal where a person was. The big difference between Mark Weiser’s approach and the rest of the computer world was that he didn’t want the system to spy on the user, not collect data that then could be used to influence or control the user. 

John Tinnell shows how the project lost some of its steam partially due to technological limits and the fact that the industry was heading in another direction. With the birth of the Web, and the explosive growth of both users and content, the world of information technology spun out of control. Mozilla became Netscape and suddenly Yahoo! was on everybody’s lips and screens. The old research labs funded by monopolies like AT&T and Xerox began to fizzle, and money started to flow from venture capitalists that had little patients for ideas like those of Mark Weiser.

All eyes were now on MIT Media Lab which became the shining star of the emerging digital age. On the one hand, projects like Thing That Think reflected some of the ideas behind ubiquitous computing, but the dominating trend was to use the new technology to track and predict what the users would do. Instead of freeing people from being stuck in front of screens, they were about to be sucked into a world where they were staring at screens of all sizes at every waking hour, which was more of a ubiquitous nightmare than anything else. An example of this brave new digital world was wearable computers, which the MIT Media Lab showed off at a big event in October 1997. It was quite a circus with Leonard Nimoy kissing a photo model on stage, causing his wearable gadget’s biosensors to signal more emotions in red lights than one would expect from Mr. Spock. 

Both I and Mark Weiser attended the event, but I was not aware of his presence, so I missed a chance to interview him, but later did an email interview with him on wearables.

In chapter 10, A Form of Worship, Tinnell explores the foundational beliefs that led Mark Weiser on his unique path as a computer researcher and the “philosopher of Palo Alto.” He wanted engineers to recognize uncertainty, the bottom of the iceberg. 

“If you were sure that your invention would be for others exactly what it was in your blueprint, then you were thinking only about the visible tip of the iceberg. You were presuming to know more than you did-your knowledge of other people was always incomplete. Even their own self-awareness was largely tacit, as was your own. Better to acknowledge these uncertainties, Weiser advised, than to presume yourself into an illusory state of omniscience. Adhering so doggedly to the pretense of certainty could push you to dismiss variables beyond your control or, worse, warp them to serve your design. Instead, Weiser urged his fellow engineers and technologists to cultivate an attitude of ‘deep humility,’ which ought chiefly to encourage ‘humility toward the role of [our] artifacts in other people's lives.’" (John Tinnell, The Philosopher of Palo Alto, University of Chicago Press, 2023, p 274)

It's a deeply humane and well researched book about a remarkable man who fought to “fit technology to humans.” (p 272)

Hans Sandberg

Mark Weiser on Ubiquitous Computing (Datateknik, February 18, 1992)

Mark Weiser on Wearable Computers (Email interview Oct 17, 1997)

Remembering Mark Weiser who Wanted to Get the Computers Out of the Way (May 26, 1999)

Remembering Mark Weiser who Wanted to Get the Computers Out of the Way (May 26, 1999)

(A brief article for Datateknik, May 26, 1999)

Mark Weiser was just 46 years old when, on April 27, he lost his battle with cancer that was discovered just six weeks earlier. Doctors had first given him a year and a half, then three months, and finally only days to live. He tried to use his remaining time to write a book on Ubiquitous Computing, the concept he introduced ten years ago, and which is now becoming a reality. But there wasn't enough time for even a first draft of the book. 

Mark Weiser's death shook many in Silicon Valley and beyond. Not just because he was the technical director of Xerox's famous lab, PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), but because of his character. Mark Weiser was the "soul and conscience" of Silicon Valley, and "he used his institution to remind anyone who would listen that in the battle between man and machine, we must let man win," wrote MSNBC's Bob Sullivan on May 5, 1999.  

I interviewed him during a visit to PARC in early 1992 and fondly remember his generosity and broad intellect. He and his team were prototyping a new kind of computing environment where computers were everywhere but not allowed to control our behavior. It was a foretaste of the "third wave," which he saw coming after the PC era, just as it replaced the mainframe era. 

"The old kind of computers, the ones that sit on your desk, require you to enter their world," said Mark Weiser, who was inspired by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger.

In an essay for Scientific American (No. 9 1991) on the computer era of the 21st century, he wrote about how writing technology faded into the background so that people stopped thinking of writing as technology. Similarly, he wanted computers to be, but not to be seen. He didn't like the idea of building even more personal, even "intimate" computers.

"It makes me sick when I hear that! Getting intimate with our computers is not the right way. We want to get computers out of the way! They should be part of our lives, like paper, pens and chairs, but we don't want to get intimate with them." (Datateknik, No. 5 1992.)

In the mid-90s, he coined the term Calm Computing, as a necessary complement to ubiquitous computing.

"With computers everywhere, we will want to use them while doing other things and have more time to be purely human. We will then have to radically rethink the goals, context, and technology of the computer and all the other technologies that intrude on our lives. Calmness is a fundamental challenge for all technological design in the next 50 years."

                                                                (Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown, head of PARC, wrote in The coming age of calm technology,, Xerox PARC, October 5, 1996.)

Hans Sandberg

US Correspondent for the Swedish computer weekly Dagens IT (Today’s IT)

Mark Weiser on Wearable Computers (Email interview Oct 17, 1997)

Email interview with Mark Weiser on Oct 17, 1997:

At 10:48 AM 10/17/97 PDT, you wrote:

Hi Mark,

I am a Swedish journalist based in Princeton, New Jersey, and I visited PARC five years ago or so for a story on Ubiquitous Computing. I just visited MIT Media Lab's symposium on Wearables, and I couldn't help but remembering what you told me about wanting the computers to disappear. What do you think about the wearable concept?

Sincerely,

Hans Sandberg

Mark Weiser's response: 

The wearable idea is terrific: one more way the computers are becoming ubiquitous.

Ubiquitous computing names the third wave of computing, where there are lots of computers in the environment, and they get lots easier to use.  It is ever more clear that the twenty-first century will be the age of ubiquitous computing, as I first said almost ten years ago. 

There are a few things that I think are dangerous in some of the wearable ideas. One insidious one is that idea that wearable means a safer, more private future, because all of my personal information will be on my body instead of trusting a server somewhere. (Ubiquitous computing as a concept is inclusive of either the server or the personal implementation.) What is insidious is thinking that there will *not* be data about you elsewhere, that keeping a computer close to your body makes you safe.  No, we will have to face up to serious new individual data privacy laws, and wearing a computer to solve privacy is a form of playing ostrich with your head in the sand. 

A second thing that I don't like about some of the wearable work is the extent to which it increases the obtrusiveness of the computer.

Translating mime language into English is pretty intrusive and anti-artistic, in my opinion. Having a 1-1 relationship with a special worn computer does not really make it very invisible to you.  As long as there is a special computer in your life, it is still the personal computer paradigm, not the ubiquitous computing paradigm, even if the computer is worn.  Invisibility means not just (and not necessarily) *physical* invisibility -- the most important thing is mental invisibility. 

Recently I have begun to focus on how we will feel as we use these ubiquitous computers.  Today clearly computers make us more frantic and overloaded.  So, I talk about the age of "calm computing", and how to bring it about.  See paper at

http://www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/acmfuture2endnote.htm (Note 2023: The link is dead, but The paper can now be found at https://calmtech.com/papers/coming-age-calm-technology.html)

I hope this helps.

-mark

P.S. Xerox is a sponsor of some of the MIT Media lab wearable work.

Mark Weiser on Ubiquitous Computing (Datateknik, February 18, 1992)

Mark Weiser, Xerox PARC:

Computers Should be, but not be Seen

With ubiquitous computing (UC), Xerox's famous PARC research center is trying to turn the way we use computers upside down. Mark Weiser, head of PARC's computer science lab, wants to make computers ubiquitous and anonymous at the same time. 

Like most innovators, Mark Weiser is dissatisfied with the status quo. 

"The old kind of computers, the ones that sit on your desk, require you to enter their world," he says. 

"It's the computer at the center, instead of the person and their work. In extreme cases, as with "virtual reality" systems, you must put on a helmet and gloves to use them. 

At PARC, which is a neighbor to Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, they are trying to do just the opposite! 

The goal is an integrated computing environment, where computers are everywhere and always available. Instead of one computer on your desk, you will have dozens, of varied sizes and functions. Each room can accommodate hundreds of computers. We should not have to drag the computer with us when we go from one room to another, because we can just pick up one of the computers in the other room and continue what we were doing in the first one. Computers should know where they are and where you are and be constantly ready to serve you. This will create radically new conditions for collaboration and increased productivity in tomorrow's offices. 

It is, in short, the dream of ubiquitous but never conspicuous computing. 

Against this background, it may be easier to understand why Mark Weiser wrote in the September issue of Scientific American that "the very idea of a 'personal' computer" is misplaced. 

"The old-style computer visionaries are trying to radicalize personal computers and make them even more personal," he said. 

“Alan Kay talks about intimate computing as the next step. It makes me sick when I hear that! Getting intimate with our computers is not the right way. We want to get computers out of the way! They should be part of our life, like paper, pens, and chairs, but we don't want to get intimate with them. It's pushing the personal and individualistic to its extreme," says Mark Weiser and asks pointedly: 

“Are you intimate with your pen?”

(Alan Kay was one of PARC's founders and is today one of the leading researchers in Apple Computer. He coined the term "dynabook," which Apple popularized with the term "knowledge navigator.") 

Paper and pencil are also technologies, but we have stopped seeing them as such. We unthinkingly take them for granted, which for Weiser is a sign of how deeply a technology has taken root in our society.

“Ubiquitous computing is the first attempt to apply in-depth what we have learned about humans over the last 20 years," says Mark Weiser.

“It is often psychological insights that drive changes in computing. For example, screens and computer graphics are responses to input from psychologists.” 

“Ubiquitous computing could only happen in a place like PARC, where you have computer scientists and anthropologists under the same roof. I came up with the concept when I was thinking about how we could respond to what the anthropologists were telling us. They studied how people use technology and talked about 'situations.' They said that we had misunderstood technology; that we had overlooked the myriad details of real situations, real spaces. About relationships between people in a room and the cultures they come from," says Mark Weiser. 

This led to a radical rethink of the way we use computers. Mark Weiser and his colleagues realized that rethinking details such as the graphical user interface (GUI) would not be enough. 

“Since a serious model of ubiquitous computing requires us to consider the details, we had to try to build elements of it and start using them as soon as possible. This was not something you could study theoretically, it had to be studied practically.”

“We eventually came up with some stuff that indicated where we are going. We know they may not be exactly the right things, but they are different enough from the current computers to help us along the way.“

At first glance, PARC's model of the UC doesn't look particularly remarkable. We have a large electronic drawing screen ("Liveboard"), which you can draw on with a digital "marker." We have many pen computers ("Pads") and a variety of small pocket-sized digital notebooks ("Tabs.")

“We've created three sizes of computers: a few inches, a foot and a yard ("inch-, foot- and yard-size computers,") which we see as a natural scale, similar to what we have in the office and in the home. (If anyone wonders where to find a yard-sized information screen in a home, Mark Weiser points to the refrigerator door, which in the US is the standard bulletin board.)    

The first thing that makes me raise my eyebrows a bit is a special application of the smallest piece of this puzzle: the "active" ID tag that Mark Weiser wears on his chest, which is  computer with a built-in infrared transmitter. This smart badge, developed in collaboration with Olivetti researchers, is constantly communicating with small antennas on the ceiling of each room. 

Smart badges can be used to both control and serve people. They can be part of a system that selectively opens doors; they can direct telephone calls and electronic mail to a person regardless of which room he is in; they can inform the computers in a room who is there. 

They can also create automatic diaries, with the system continuously recording where you are (unless you put the ID badge in a pocket, which blocks its infrared signals). The system creates an automatic log of where you've been and who else has been in the same place, a list that can be a valuable memory aid. (Mark Weiser is aware that many fear that this is an invasion of privacy -- "Big Brother is watching you" – but he believes that this can be avoided through social norms about how the system is used and by allowing individuals to control such private information themselves.)

The smallest computers in the UC system, let's call them tabs, are intended to function as a very simple writing tool, an electronic scratch paper. Once could compare them to simple pocket calculators. Mark Weiser imagines a hundred such tabs in a typical office room.

The next step in the scale is "Pads," electronic notebooks. (I refrain from suggesting a translation of this term!) They are similar to pen computers, but serve a different function, as illustrated by the fact that a room can have 10-20 "Pads." Just like in Windows you can have several programs open at once, you can have several "Pads" active on your desktop. The difference is that the previous window environments are crowded on one and the same screen, while the PARC model can have them lying next to you in full scale. 

Each room will also have one or two "live boards", which can be used for communication (e.g., video conferencing) or presentations. 

The basic elements of "ubiquitous computing" are based on technologies that either already exist or are imminent. Lightweight handheld computers, pen computers and projection screens with a pen input system (an infrared camera records the movement of the digital "pen"), a largely wireless local computer network, and a number of networked computers.

What makes the system as a whole unique is the total integration of such a large number of computers, all communicating with each other in a uniform way and each part knowing where it is. 

While Mark Weiser is drawing on his "big screen," I can give him written comments, directly from my "Pad." They will appear on his screen. I can also take the content of his screen and save it as an icon on a "Tab" to later call up the same image on another "big screen". The system is everywhere, and I can access it no matter where I am in the building. It's completely different from carrying a pen computer from room to room and connecting to a local network.

"Some people think we're going to get there anyway, more or less automatically, but I don't think so," says Mark Weiser. "Instead, we're going to have clusters of networks communicating in different niches, like pagers, mobile phones and personal computers of various kinds. Compare that to the access we have to literature in this room. We have immediate access to all the words in the room, without having to worry about what format they are printed in. As long as we (in the computer world) are dominated by these niches, we will never have "seamless" access to the world of information, where you can pick up a scrap computer and just start working. 

It is important to remember that UC is still only a research project, which may change considerably before Xerox decides to try to bring it to market. First, some of the difficult technical challenges the system faces must be addressed. 

"We're going to need much more wireless communication than any company today can imagine," says Mark Weiser. "We need connections between hundreds of computers in a building, whereas companies in this field think in terms of one person, one computer.

PARC researchers have therefore had to develop their own wireless networks with tiny cells, each covering a room.

Another problem is building a stable system, with so many loosely linked computers. 

“You must make sure that the whole system doesn't collapse if one computer fails, something that current distributed computing systems are poor at. We need a much more robust technology for networked computers," he says. 

Both computer operating systems and window management technology need to undergo major changes to enable ubiquitous computing.

The third challenge is the ability to build small. This is a prerequisite for producing sufficiently small, lightweight, and inexpensive tabs.           

Even if the Xerox researchers in Palo Alto succeed in meeting these and other technological challenges, it remains to be seen how the parent company meets the market challenges. In the 1970s, Xerox managed to fumble a series of brilliant inventions, losing both its geniuses and the markets they created. 

Hopefully, the 90s harvest from PARC will not suffer the same fate.

Hans Sandberg

Background:

Xerox: Not only copiers

But what does Xerox have to do with computers? Quite a lot and for three reasons. 

First, because in 1970, CEO Peter McColough set up a research center to study how complex organizations use information. This center, the Palo Alto Research Center, located in a hilly area near Stanford University, would prove to be extremely creative. For example, the first Alto personal computer/workstation was invented here in 1974. Although a commercial failure, it introduced many concepts that would shape the personal computer revolution and Apple's successful Macintosh: overlapping windows, icons, mouse, bitmap graphics. PARC also led the development of local area networks with its Ethernet and was the birthplace of the first object-oriented programming language, Smalltalk.

The second reason is that Xerox for a long a time had the ambition to become a computer company. In 1987, it gave up on selling its own computer systems and exclusive operating systems in favor of Sun's SPARC computers and the SunOS operating system. Today it focuses on developing and selling applications for office automation and in particular advanced desktop publishing and image processing. 

The third reason is that Xerox digital copiers are computers. They contain networks of microprocessors and advanced software, including expert technical monitoring systems.