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Artificial moral agents are necessary and inevitable. Innovative technologies are converging on sophisticated systems that will require some capacity for moral decision making. With the implementation of driverless trains, the “trolley cases” invented by ethicists to study moral dilemmas may represent actual challenges for artificial moral agents. Among the difficult tasks for designers of such systems is to specify what the goals should be, i.e. what is meant by a “good” artificial moral agent? Computer viruses are among the software agents that already cause harm. Credit card approval systems are among the examples of autonomous systems that already affect daily life in ethically significant ways but are “ethically blind” because they lack moral decision‐making capacities. Pervasive and ubiquitous computing, the introduction of service robots in the home to care for the elderly, and the deployment of machine‐gun‐carrying military robots expand the possibilities of software and robots without sensitivity to ethical considerations harming people.

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.

Computing is increasingly intertwined with our physical world. From smart watches to connected cars, to the Internet of Things and 3D-printing, the trend towards combining digital and analogue materials in design is no longer an exception, but a hallmark for where interaction design is going in general. Computational processing increasingly involves physical materials, computing is increasingly manifested and expressed in physical form, and interaction with these new forms of computing is increasingly mediated via physical materials. Interaction Design is therefore increasingly a material concern. – Welcome to a book on the materiality of interaction, welcome to a book on material-centered interaction design! In this introduction to this book, “The Materiality of Interaction – Notes on the Materials of Interaction Design”, I describe the contemporary trend in interaction design towards material interactions, I describe how interaction design is increasingly about materials, and I propose “Material-centered interaction design” as a method for working with materials in interaction design projects.

This chapter discusses game interface design with point of departure in interaction design. It draws upon the insights of experienced game interface designers, and questions the idea that the best game interfaces are those that make the game appear unmediated, and asks what it means for an interface to be integrated into the gameworld environment. It is argued that a gameplay-sensitive approach to game design must be linked to game interfaces is associated with a user-centered, activity-centered, as well as context-centered approach, and that the ideals of ubiquitous computing are more central than the ideals of transparency. This means that the goal of the game interface is not to disappear from the player’s view, but to become so conventional and familiar to the game that it is accepted because it helps the player interact with the gameworld in a meaningful way.

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).

This chapter discusses the fourth of six layers in The Stack, the Address layer. For any entity to participate in the wider Stack architecture it has to be known to it. It must be enumerated and enunciated by an address. The chapter examines very-large scale universal internet addressing systems (such as IPv6) that would allow for an abyssal volume of individual addressees. Some programs for ubiquitous computing and an ‘internet of things’ suggest scenarios that draw almost any, into a landscape of addressable objects. However, for “Deep Address,” the computational landscape can absorb any conceivable object, event or relation, regardless of scale or temporality into a vast, if also fragile, communicative field. Ultimately the scope and complexity of than landscape may exceed the limits of human control or literacy. The chapter also discusses the ramifications of the superimposition of multiple, internally-complete and self-sufficient addressing schemes onto the same territory, and how this complicates platform interoperability but also may allow for important variation and resiliency.

The digital network is pervasive in contemporary society. The proliferation of mobile phones and the growth of broadband in developed countries have increased the everyday accessibility, ubiquity, and mobility of technological networks. As a result, our concept of place has been dramatically altered, along with our sense of proximity and distance. This chapter examines both the networking of space and the spatiality of digital networks and looks at a series of key conditions ranging from the everyday superimposition of real and virtual spaces to the rise of a mobile sense of place and popular virtual worlds. It also considers the concept of telecocooning, RFIDs, and ubiquitous computing.

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 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 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 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.

The chapter begins with a brief history of surveillance starting in the 15th century and the emergence of a “policed society” based on systematically gathering and analyzing personal information. In such a society agents of the state, commerce and industry come to exercise control over ever-wider social and geographical areas. Bentham with his Panopitcon and Foucault and many others have noted these changes. The changes went beyond prisons to schools and factories. Ubiquitous computing is a part of this with ever more networked sensors and measures of time, place and behavior woven together. The chapter defines the new surveillance and contrasts it with traditional surveillance. This is done through identifying dimensions by which any surveillance setting and/or act can be categorized. The new surveillance tends to be more intensive, extensive, extends the senses, is based on aggregates and big data, has lower visibility, and involves involuntary compliance, decreased cost and remote locations. While the historical trend here is clear, it is more difficult to generalize about other characteristics such as whether or not surveillance has become more deceptive, more valid in its conclusions and is harder to neutralize.

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.