I am a research fellow and lecturer in the School of Computer Science, University of Nottingham. I work at Horizon Digital Economy Research and also the Mixed Reality Lab.
This page contains updates on my own research, as well as general notes and comments on issues in human-computer interaction, computer-supported cooperative work, ethnomethodology and other related research work.
This site is embedded in my research pages at the University of Nottingham.
My paper Envisioning Ubiquitous Computing was presented at CHI 2012. However, as I was unable to attend, fragments of this video were used Steve Benford, who kindly gave the paper on my behalf. (Note that I have used a range of images scraped off the web for this presentation and thus the copyright is probably dubious.)
CHI 2012 publication: “Envisioning ubiquitous computing”
My paper “Envisioning ubiquitous computing” is to be published at CHI 2012. You can grab a PDF of it here. Full reference and abstract below.
Reeves, S. Envisioning ubiquitous computing. In Proceedings of SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI). ACM Press, May 2012.
Visions of the future are a common feature of discourse within ubiquitous computing and, more broadly, HCI. ‘Envisioning’, a characteristic future-oriented technique for design thinking, often features as significant part of our research processes in the field. This paper compares, contrasts and critiques the varied ways in which envisionings have been used within ubiquitous computing and traces their relationships to other, different envisionings, such as those of virtual reality. In unpacking envisioning, it argues primarily that envisioning should be foregrounded as a significant concern and interest within HCI. Foregrounding envisioning’s frequent mix of fiction, forecasting and extrapolation, the paper recommends changes in the way we read, interpret and use envisionings through taking into account issues such as context and intended audience.
Future challenges for pervasive and ubiquitous computing, and a response
I have been looking at the nature of `envisioning work’ in technology design; in short, how people go about working out what to research, build and test, although this work extends beyond the near future into long-term guiding `visions’.
A premier, extremely well-cited example of envisioning work (with citations attesting the popularity of such envisionings) is provided in this paper by Satyanarayanan:
An interesting critique on this is found in the following paper:
Lueg notes the way in which envisioned scenarios that Satyanarayanan (and others) employs involve significant assumptions in order to drive them, in spite of those assumptions glossing a huge and non-trivial problem (e.g., context-awareness).
An interesting breakdown and dissection of the various varieties and forms of futurism may be found here.
