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.