Future Living in a Participatory Way

Introduction

Imagine you live in a context aware house that reacts on you and the environment you live in. When you wake up lights automatically switch on and curtains open. Standing in front of the bathroom mirror when brushing your teeth in the morning, a shopping list of things you need to buy today is displayed based on what is in your fridge. When entering the kitchen you smell the coffee that is ready. The door locks automatically when you leave the house and when coming home in the evening the song that corresponds with your current mood and day activities is playing and your house is warm because the central heating was switched on one hour before you entered the house so that it had your preferred temperature.

The ideal situation: an invisible, personalized, adaptive and anticipatory house that mediates social interaction between you and your environment. It seems perfect to let boring routines be carried out by a system. But how will the context aware house act when you are sick and want to stay in bed? And will you be able to get coffee even if you don’t have brushed your teeth, or get coffee for two when somebody stayed overnight?

Different authors (e.g. Weiser, 1991) already predicted these moral questions long time ago. Technically a lot can nowadays be realized that works very well in a lab environment. The behavior of context aware houses can be defined as a set of rules, each formulated as actions that are executed when certain conditions are met. Rules in computer programs, however, become more on more complex and are most often hidden to the users. Although technologically context aware houses can be realized, why aren’t they used frequently in everyday life? Is it because they are too expensive to install? Is it because it’s all about rather useless luxury applications? Maybe, but the embedded vision on ‘context’ within the application and the vision on ‘participation’ when developing applications seem also to be part of the problem.

From above examples we can distillate two important observations, typical for context aware applications. First, the issue that the vision on context awareness is very much technological driven and often do not take into account the meaning of context for the person that acts in his or her own environment. But context isn’t something that describes a setting; it’s something that people do, the horizon within which the user makes sense of the world (Heidegger, 1927). Therefore context cannot be defined as a fixed set of characteristics. Second, context awareness seems to imply loose of control for the person concerned. In contradiction to almost all other applications, typically for context awareness is that there is no need ‘to give authorization to do this or that’. Issues as privacy, autonomy and control frequently don’t seem to be implicated. Users often don’t have impact on the feedback loop (Crutzen, 2005a).

We believe that these issues are an important part of the explanation for the only very slowly integration of context aware applications in everyday life. The explanation for this could lie in the difference between what society wants and what technology does, or between social requirements and technical feasibility (e.g. Ackerman, 2000). We try to define the problem in another way because we believe that technology and society could never be ‘matched totally’ before the adoption process starts. We consider the socio-technical gap not as a problem but as a reality. The gap implies opportunities for co-construction and diversification for the development of context aware applications.

We propose to take the ‘best’ out of both worlds by introducing the concept of ‘critical user participation’ going back to the original meaning of user participation the Participatory Design movement attached to it, namely the issue of power and its distribution (Beck, 2001).