Digital plumbing: the mundane work of deploying UbiComp in the home

Deploying UbiComp in real homes is central to realizing Weiserʼs grand vision of ʻinvisibleʼ computing. It is essential to moving design out of the lab and making it into an unremarkable feature of everyday life. Deployment can be problematic however, and in ways that a number of researchers have already pointed to. In this paper we wish to complement the communityʼs growing understanding of challenges to deployment. We focus on ʻdigital plumbingʼ – i.e., the mundane work involved in installing ubiquitous computing in real homes. Digital plumbing characterizes the act of deployment. It draws attention to the work of installation: to the collaborative effort of co-situating prototypical technologies in real homes, to the competences involved, the practical troubles encountered, and the demands that real world settings place on the enterprise. We provide an ethnographic study of the work. It makes visible the unavoidable need for UbiComp researchers to develop new technologies wi...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: PUC
• Authors: Peter Tolmie, Andy Crabtree, Stefan Rennick Egglestone, Jan Humble, Chris Greenhalgh, Tom Rodden
• Keywords: Digital Plumbing, PUC 2010, Real Homes, Ubiquitous Computing