Wednesday, August 27, 2003
Notes on 'Smart Clothing'
Some of the new directions in Human--Computer Interaction (HCI) suggest bringing advanced computing into all aspects of life. Computers everywhere, constantly monitoring our activities, and responding ``intelligently'' have the potential to make matters worse... because of the possibility of excluding the individual user from knowledge not only of certain aspects of the computer upon his or her desk, but also of the principle of operation and the function of everyday things. ...A varied supply of ideas, like biodiversity, leads to advancement in thought, and new paradigms in computing. Thus a single entity controlling all the world's supply of software, and in some sense, thought (e.g. a single entity providing all of the world's WWW browsers, and therefore, in some sense influencing the world's Internet content, or a single entity providing all of the world's dictionaries or automatic spell checking programs, in some sense influencing the use of language), could reduce the world's diversity of thought. Seamlessness of thought may reduce intellectual diversity, in the same way that monocropping reduces biodiversity. ...There are a number of researchers who have been proposing new computer user--interfaces based on environmental sensors. Increasingly we are witnessing the emergence of ``intelligent highways'', ``smart rooms'', ``smart floors'', ``smart ceilings'', ``smart toilets'', ``smart elevators'', ``smart lightswitches'', etc.. However, a typical attribute of these ``smart spaces'' is that they were architected by someone other than the occupant. Thus the end--user of the space often does not have a full disclosure of the operational characteristics of the sensory apparatus and the flow of intelligence data from the sensory apparatus. ...What is proposed is a computational framework for individual personal empowerment. This framework involves the architecting of a new kind of personal space, through an apparatus that is owned, operated, and controlled by the occupant of that space. In some sense, it is like a building, built for one occupant, and collapsed down around that one occupant. This computational framework for HI is called ``WearComp''... [eyetap.org]
...`Smart Clothing' offers an alternative to centralized surveillance. It suggests a future in which people, through prosthesis, might have both improved visual memory and improved ability to share it. But it also suggests a hope that the visual memory be distributed among people, and be less likely to be abused than if it exist in a centralized form, as is more common with a network of surveillance cameras...
Putting video imagery in the hands of everyday people, every day, restores the symmetry between the observed and the observers.
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