In December 2005 Adam Greenfield asked me to work with him on icon concepts for his book Everyware. Here is Adam’s description of his book:

“The age of ubiquitous computing is here: a computing without computers, where information processing has diffused into everyday life, and virtually disappeared from view. What does this mean to those of us who will be encountering it? How will it transform our lives? And how will we learn to make wise decisions about something so hard to see?”

The icons were for the section headers of the book, covering the ideas that Adam felt were important around making aspects of ubiquitous computing visible. These were the suggested themes:

• Augmented-reality information is available in this location
• This object has invisible qualities (could be almost identical with the last of these four)
• Warning: sensor field
• Information processing dissolving in behavior (i see this as bits flowing through a handshake)
• Media surface

• Network dead zone

  I made a quick sketch that has some icons that are consistent with my earlier work on a graphic language for touch-based interactions. I’ve used the dashed line again to show borders and invisible geometry. Not all of these are successful, but I think they show some interesting directions for the future.

  

  Click for a larger size image. Download as pdf.

  I think in particular the Network dead zone, Warning: sensor field and this object has invisible qualities are particularly successful. The book used a set of icons inspired by these, you can see a selection on Flickr.

  Technorati Tags: ubicomp, ubiquitous computing, icons, iconography, visual design, graphic design

  28 September 2006 by Timo