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4
Developing Applications in
Cooperation: X’treme Prototyping
Ubiquitous and wearable computing have been around for more than a decade now
[
Weiser 1991
]
. However, there is still no consensus on what these new technologies
are going to be used for. Traditionally, application development in ubiquitous and
wearable computing communities has been mostly technology driven. This has lead
to a variety of applications
[
Korjea-aho 2000
] [
Schilit et al. 1994
] [
Arnstein et al.
2002
]
of which only few are really being used in practice, e.g.
[
Bardram 2004
] [
Davies
et al. 1998
] [
Fuller et al. 2000
]
. This may be seen as an indication that current prac-
tices are too unsystematic and rely too much on developers’ and designers’ intuition
alone. This general problem is widely recognized and consequently many researchers
in ubiquitous computing evaluate their prototypes in various ways. Clearly, evalu-
ation techniques are very important in particular when they are suited to evaluate
ubiquitous computing applications in realistic settings
[
Consolvo et al. 2002
]
. We
argue in this chapter, however, that they only partly tackle the question of what is
useful and what is perceived problematic from a user’s perspective
[
Kjeldskov and
Graham 2003
]
also in a longer term perspective.
In order to provide more benefit for users, it is essential to break with current practice
that mostly designers and technologist attempt to judge the value of a specific
technology. It is rather necessary to explore together with users opportunities of
new technology and applications that provide real benefit in realistic settings and in
a longer term perspective. Introducing applications with ubiquitous and wearable
technologies to real world scenarios and using those on a large scale could help
to identify and face more fundamental challenges in human-computer interaction.
It also would increase the prominence of ubiquitous and wearable computing in
everyday life, as real users could experience and realize its benefits.
When introducing new technologies many researchers – including ourselves (see
Chapter 3) – have experienced that there is a latent tension between a technologi-
cally advanced solution and the focus on the user. For the introduction of advanced
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