Special issue on science fiction and ubiquitous computing
Special issue on science fiction and ubiquitous computing
复制标题
科幻小说与普适计算特刊
DOI：
10.1007/s00779-014-0773-4
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发表时间：
2014
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
Paul Dourish
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Jofish Kaye;Paul Dourish
这期《个人和普适计算》特刊的酝酿时间甚至比正常期刊的制作周期还要长。最初的征文呼吁是在6年前发出的。如果临市局的大部分特刊在创刊6年后付印，便会变得无关紧要和过时。然而，这里有一些东西具有真正的持久力。具有讽刺意味的是，科幻小说对未来的关注让时间的流逝变得不那么成问题。我们希望你会同意阅读这本书，有两个原因使这项工作保持最新：相关和令人兴奋的。首先，在这些论文中，我们广泛地确定或讨论了技术和想象力的主题。虽然技术的特殊性在变化，最新、最时髦的产品也在变化，但设计和分析背后的精神仍然是一样的。技术来来去去，但技术想象力的变化要慢得多--我们在这里谈论的是技术想象力。(下一次你听到有人谈论技术变化有多快时，你可能想要考虑的问题不是技术，而是刺激它的想象力，以及它是否具有同样的时间动态。)二是研究课题。因为我们选择使用文学和小说作为我们的工具--尤其是发生在不同时期的小说--它保持了更稳定的状态。《指环王》现在和托尔金写它的时候一样吸引了人们的想象力，因为它不同于现实世界，也不像当时那样不同于现实世界。科幻小说存在于我们的现实之外；我们把它作为一个镜头来看待科学实践的基本活动。即使我们身处2014年，电影2001仍然具有影响力，1984年也是如此。那么问题就变成了为什么是科幻小说，科幻小说和无处不在的计算之间的关系是什么？科学研究和投机小说之间的关系由来已久，证明了一个事实，即最初的星际迷航航天飞机(航天飞机以此命名)的风扇修复道具现在在NASA的休斯顿太空飞行中心永久展出。在康斯坦斯·彭利的《NASA/Trek》一书[1]中，她探讨了NASA工程师受到《星际迷航》影响的方式，尤其是对进步的文化想象，而不是技术或科学本身。更接近我们无处不在计算的根源，Eric Paulos组织了一个关于城市计算的研讨会，来自ArtCenter(以及最近的UCLA)的Peter Lunenfeld在研讨会上抱怨说，科学家和工程师认为可以从文学中学到的东西太少了，作为试金石，并表示这些工作比普通的用户研究要有趣得多。最近，人们对被称为“设计小说”的作品的兴趣--正如托尼·邓恩和菲奥娜·拉比、朱利安·布利克等人的作品所强调的那样--显示了将卢南菲尔德的洞察力铭记在心的力量。这两个结合在一起，并结合在ubiomp的研究在某种意义上是虚构的方式：我们想象世界，我们想象用户。这不是真正的参与式设计--它不可能是参与式设计，因为我们总是在想象未来的用户，因为根据定义，他们还不存在。因此，本期收集的这一系列工作开始质疑我们对科幻小说的一些假设。J.Kaye(&)雅虎实验室，加利福尼亚州桑尼维尔，美国，电子邮件：jofish@Yahoo-inc.com
This Special Issue of Personal and Ubiquitious Computing has been in gestation for even longer than normal journal production cycles would suggest. The original call for papers came out 6 years ago. If most special issues of PUC went to press 6 years after they started, they would be irrelevant and outdated. And yet there is something here with real staying power. Ironically enough, the focus on the future that science fiction suggests makes the passage of time less problematic. As we hope you will agree in reading this volume, there are two reasons that this work remains current: relevant and exciting. The first is that within these papers, we are identifying or discussing, broadly, topics of technology and imagination. While the specificities of technologies change, and the latest, fanciest products change, the ethos of what lies behind the design and analysis remains the same. Technologies come and go, but technological imagination shifts much more slowly—and what we are talking about here is the technological imagination. (Next time you hear someone talk about how quickly technology changes, you might want to consider the question not of technology but the imagination that spurred it, and whether it has the same temporal dynamics.) The second is the topic of study. Because we chose to use literature and fiction as our tool—and in particular fiction that takes place in alternative time periods—it remains more stable. The Lord of the Rings captures the imagination as much now as it did when Tolkien wrote it because it is unlike the real world, and it is as unlike the real world now as it was then. Science fiction exists outside our reality; we are using it as a lens to look at the fundamental activity of scientific practice. The movie 2001 still has power even though we are in 2014, as does 1984. The question then becomes why science fiction, and what is the relationship between science fiction and ubiquitous computing? There is a long relationship between scientific research and speculative fiction, as evidenced by the fact that fan-restored prop of the original Star Trek shuttle (after which the space shuttle was named) is now on permanent display at NASA’s Houston space flight center. In Constance Penley’s book NASA/Trek [1], she explores the ways in which NASA engineers have been influenced by Star Trek, and in particular the cultural imagination of progress, not the technology or science itself. Closer to our roots in ubiquitous computing, Eric Paulos organized a workshop on Urban Computing at which Peter Lunenfeld from ArtCenter (and latterly UCLA) complaining how little scientists and engineers felt there was to be learned from literature as a touchstone, and suggested that those works were much more interesting than your average user study. More recent interests in what have been labeled ‘‘design fictions’’—as highlighted in the work of Tony Dunne and Fiona Raby, Julian Bleecker, and others—have shown the power to taking Lunenfeld’s insight to heart. Those two came together and combined with the way in which research in ubicomp is in some senses fictive: we imagine worlds, we imagine users. It is not really participatory design—it cannot be participatory design, because we are always imagining future users, since by very definition they do not exist yet. As such, this body of work collected in this issue starts to question some of the assumptions that we have around what makes up science fiction. J. Kaye (&) Yahoo Labs, Sunnyvale, CA, USA e-mail: jofish@yahoo-inc.com