Dana+Cuff+-+Immanent+Domain+Pervasive+Computing+and+the+Public+Realm

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 * Responsive Environments and Artifacts: DISAPPEARANCE - Readings **
 * Reading: **Dana Cuff - Immanent Domain Pervasive Computing and the Public Realm
 * Discussion Mediator: **Name qsu@gsd.harvard.edu__


 * Reading Summary (1000 words): **

 A wave of emergent digital technology holds vast implications for the public sphere. Indeed, these new forms of mobile and ubiquitous systems, called pervasive computing, challenge some of our fundamental ideas about subjectivity, visibility, space, and the distinction between public and private. Together, these challenges reformulate our conception of the civic realm. From cell phones to wireless local area networks, smart buildings to embedded vehicular computers, an invisible web of digital technology already lies across the visible world creating new space for work, data, advertisement, investigation, communication, intimacy, and danger. This generation of computers is so well integrated with the environment that it will be difcult to distinguish between the two, which represents a profound transformation for everyday life.  This essay makes the argument that, although embodied virtuality has emerged from clear historic precedent and origins, it raises four distinct implications that hold the potential to change our ideas about space and spatial practices. First, our environment is enacted and given life, not in the sense that robots are actuated, but the entirety of the physical environment is re-created as a potential source of coordinated, interdependent actions and reactions. Whether this enacted environment is actual or imagined, as Foucault argued in the case of the panopticon, it reformulates our notions of power and, moreover, our relationship to the world around us. Second, visibility both literal and metaphorical is transformed. What was solid and opaque becomes transparent, yet what makes the hidden accessible is itself invisible. Third, further erosion of the concepts of public and private force their reconsideration. In particular, questions of surveillance, control, and exhibitionism render the distinction between public and private anew. Fourth, heightened security and surveillance possibilities hold the potential to restructure civility, or public life as we know it. If the “public geography of a city is civility institutionalized” and if civility is, as Sennett puts it, “treating others as though they were strangers and forging a social bond upon that social distance,” then the designer must invent means to embed the possibility of civility into both new pervasive technologies  and new urban geographies.22 What does it mean to embed civility in the public sphere? I would offer three linked guiding principles—information, choice, and control—which architects must nd ways to embody in physical form.  This is “the infusion of human knowledge into the material environment.” Giddens identies rightly “the altered character of the relation between human beings and the physical environment.”23 What I have called the enacted environment, Weiser’s embodied virtuality, is knowledge extended such that the material environment is infused also with intelligent action and reaction, data gathering, surveillance, and networked information. The intensity of risk increases substantially, but so can the intensity of experience.


 * Questions and Challenges: **
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 * Documentation of Class Discussions and Responses to Questions and Challenges: **

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