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This chapter describes several innovative ubicomp applications that assist in the management of chronic diseases. These applications include ones that promote an emotional connection between patients and their distant family members, provide individuals with mobile monitors to allow capture of diabetes-related data while patients go about their usual daily routines and enable the collections of data by one set of professionals to be analyzed by another set. This chapter suggests that chronic diseases present significant challenges on multiple levels and provides several reasons why chronic diseases do not fit with the traditional health care view.

This chapter discusses the design and development process for ubicomp technologies for diabetes management. It describes three prototype applications, including the Continuous Health Awareness Program (CHAP), Mobile Access to Health Information (MAHI) and Diabetes Tagging (Di-Tag). It highlights the benefits of a continuous iterative approach to the design of novel computing technologies and their potential to illuminate various aspects of such complex and intricate activities as diabetes management.

This introductory chapter sets out the book’s purpose, which is to examine the process of “divining a digital future.” Taking ubicomp to be at once a technological and an imaginative effort, it explores the vision that has driven the ubicomp research agenda and the contemporary practices which have emerged. Drawing on cross-cultural investigations of technology adoption, the chapter argues for developing a “ubiquitous computing of the present” that takes the messiness of everyday life as a central theme.

This chapter begins with a discussion of Weiser’s classic article in Scientific American (1991) that laid the foundations for a research program in ubicomp, then turning its attention to the balance between past, present, and future embedded in conventional discourses about ubicomp. Of particular interest is the central conundrum posed by the fact that Weiser’s vision of the future is not only by this point an old one but also an extremely North American one. The chapter addresses the following questions: First, how should we understand the relationship between ubicomp’s envisioned future and our everyday present? Second, what influence does this have on contemporary ubicomp research? Third, what motivates and explains the remarkable persistence as well as centrality of Weiser’s vision?

This chapter focuses on the social and cultural aspects of ubicomp. It explores the tensions between two competing notions of culture—one rooted in contemporary ethnographic and critical theory and the other in the more instrumentalist practices of ubicomp. Drawing on examples from the anthropological canon and the authors’ recent work, the chapter suggests that the adoption of a more generative notion of culture within ubicomp has profound and destablizing consequences, which are discussed at length throughout the book.

This chapter seeks to reconnect the ways in which research questions (i.e., methodologies) are approached with the ways in which such questions might be framed, articulated, and addressed (i.e., theory). It explores a broader view of methodology and theory, using ethnography and its relationships to ubicomp as a starting point. The chapter argues that by relegating ethnographic knowledge to implications for technological design, ubicomp practitioners fail to capture the value of ethnographic investigations, insights, and knowledge. Yet it does function as a useful avenue to open up a larger conversation not only about how ethnography is currently prefigured in ubicomp, but also how it could be powerfully reimagined. Of particular interest is how ethnographic theory can help reposition research questions and directions without a reliance on fieldwork. The chapter thus illustrates the implications for design which might be derived from classical ethnographic material, and shows that these may not be in the form which ubicomp research normally imagines or expects.

This chapter examines two aspects of infrastructure and practice relevant for emerging ubicomp technologies and environments; these are referred to as the infrastructure of experience and the experience of infrastructure. The discussion of the infrastructure of experience focuses on how our encounters with everyday environments depend on both the practices in which we might be able to engage and the structures that are inscribed into those environments by those practices. The discussion of the experience of infrastructure focuses on the ways in which infrastructures offer themselves up to people for manipulation and interaction.

This chapter examines the cultural contexts of mobility and reads these back against the dominant tropes and themes of mobility within ubicomp. It considers recent attempts to explore the social and cultural aspects of mobility in human–computer interaction and ubicomp, conjoined with a burgeoning interest in collaboration and interaction beyond traditional working settings, including leisure settings and museums, or gallery spaces and universities. The chapter begins by discussing the relationship between mobility, spatiality, and technology as it has developed in ubicomp research before presenting a series of contexts—mythical, moral, imagined, and historical—for everyday mobility, and reflecting on what these might tell us about the prospects for mobile interactive technologies. Recent projects are used to illustrate new avenues for design exploration and analysis.

This chapter recontextualizes the discussions of privacy in, and of, information systems by using the related concepts of secrets and lies to examine how people interpret, value, and understand flows and exchanges of information. How do we want to think about the ways in which people report location to others, for example? How does an examination of the maintenance and enactment of social relations in everyday life help us reevaluate the technological notion that “information wants to be free”—a notion which looks quite different when we think about Western scientific data, axial religious practices, or even the secret sharing of North American teens? What emerges is a focus on the practices of articulating and sharing information as a means of cultural production, a way in which people engage in meaningful social interaction and the negotiation of collective meaning.

This chapter seeks to articulate a clear framework for thinking about the kind of interdisciplinary engagements that this book exemplifies, and to build on that framework and point to some fruitful areas for ubicomp’s next twenty years. In other words, it outlines some of the characteristics of a new ubicomp agenda. This agenda should be read alongside and as a complement to such works as Adam Greenfield’s Everyware (2006), Malcolm McCullough’s On Digital Ground (2004), and Bruce Sterling’s Shaping Things (2005).