Endnotes to Changing Places: Contexts of Awareness in Computing

[1] Exceptions do exist, such as the notorious problem of passing subway trains disrupting films at the Angelika Film Center in New York. Many theaters are also susceptible to sirens from passing emergency vehicles.

[2] Much more complicated analytical frameworks would be required, of course, to support real design activities. One of the most sophisticated is the Locales Framework (Fitzpatrick, Kaplan, and Mansfield 1996). Fitzpatrick, Kaplan, and Parsowith (1998) use this framework to analyze the spatial organization of work activities in buildings. Leading examples of institutional analysis of computing include Danziger, Dutton, Kling, and Kraemer (1982) and Mansell and Steinmuller (2000).

[3] Exceptions do exist. Flanagan (2000) describes the mixture of building types in a new generation of hospitals. And in small traditional cottages, such as those of the mountains of Norway, all activities are necessarily conducted in the same space.

[4] It should be remarked, though, that these devices are limited by the difficulty of sensing on the body during normal daily activity, and by the limitations of current battery technology (Starner personal communication, 12/16/00).

[5] Cell-phone jammers are available legally in some countries (Wylie 2000). At least one system is available commercially to enforce house rules on Bluetooth-enabled devices; see <http://www.bluelinx.com/products.htm>.

[6] The categorical structures of the two institutional settings may not be completely different: in both restaurants and theaters one has, for example, customers and employees. As with the case of "house rules" that transcend different sorts of architectural places, the broad categories of customers and employees are found in many institutional settings, and some rules might apply to all such interactions, perhaps with refinements for each particular institution. For the most part, however, we should anticipate that different institutions' categories will be incommensurable in unexpected and insidious ways.

[7] This example derives from a project at UCLA by Robin Dodge, Sidarth Khoshoo, Paul Miller, and Ping Wang.

[8] In his work on "intelligent" meeting rooms, Coen (1998) argues that a strong technological coupling between the meeting participants and the room technology can be avoided using techniques from artificial intelligence. Some useful functionalities can surely be provided that way. The challenge, on the analysis presented here, is whether AI techniques can be used to infer the socially-constructed facts that the room system would need to register in order to provide more advanced functionalities.