Should invisibility be the guiding design goal for ubiquitous computing

WHEN INVISIBILITY FAILS Benjamin Mako Hill has been examining instances where the invisibility of technology breaks down. His website, revealingerrors.com, documents occasions when a crash or error makes one of the invisible technologies underlying our lives alarmingly visible, forcing us to confront its technological innards. Figure 1 shows a few examples. The crashed ATM with its exposed Windows desktop and the GPS system that locates itself in the ocean are self-explanatory errors, but the third example requires some elucidation. The text at the top of the webpage should read “Gay eases into 100 final at Olympic trials,” Gay being the surname of athlete Tyson Gay. This strange headline reveals the fact that the website posting the news feed, a conservative network called One News Now, uses a program to adjust the language of AP news stories. Here we see that part of their program replaces instances of the word “gay” with the word “homosexual.” Hill argues that such breakdowns Leah Buechley, MIT Media Lab