The Relevance of Social Issues in Ubiquitous Computing Environments

Jessup, L. M. and Robey, D. 2002. The relevance of social issues in ubiquitous computing environments. Commun. ACM 45, 12 (Dec. 2002)

This papers illustrates how ubiquitous computing challenges individuals, teams and organizations to rethink their behaviors. Because of the new possibilities enabled by ubiquitous computing do not carry their own prescriptions, people must discover new behaviors on their own. The authors suggest the now obvious mix of old and new practices “virtual teams may need to employ older technologies, such as telephones, or even face-to-face meetings to complement their dependence on ubiquitous computing technologies”.

Relation to my thesis: The authors optimistically match new technologies with new opportunities for social actions, organizational forms and business models. All this is true, but they do not really take into account the way to carry pleasant user experience in the shift. Technologies are disruptive and people are most of the time left on their own. They build their own mental models and the goal for ubicomp practitioners is to avoid mismatches in ever growing complex environments. My research questions are related to one research issue the authors mention: How do work teams adopt and adapt ubiqutous compututing technologies?