Special issue on science fiction and ubiquitous computing

This Special Issue of Personal and Ubiquitious Computing has been in gestation for even longer than normal journal production cycles would suggest. The original call for papers came out 6 years ago. If most special issues of PUC went to press 6 years after they started, they would be irrelevant and outdated. And yet there is something here with real staying power. Ironically enough, the focus on the future that science fiction suggests makes the passage of time less problematic. As we hope you will agree in reading this volume, there are two reasons that this work remains current: relevant and exciting. The first is that within these papers, we are identifying or discussing, broadly, topics of technology and imagination. While the specificities of technologies change, and the latest, fanciest products change, the ethos of what lies behind the design and analysis remains the same. Technologies come and go, but technological imagination shifts much more slowly—and what we are talking about here is the technological imagination. (Next time you hear someone talk about how quickly technology changes, you might want to consider the question not of technology but the imagination that spurred it, and whether it has the same temporal dynamics.) The second is the topic of study. Because we chose to use literature and fiction as our tool—and in particular fiction that takes place in alternative time periods—it remains more stable. The Lord of the Rings captures the imagination as much now as it did when Tolkien wrote it because it is unlike the real world, and it is as unlike the real world now as it was then. Science fiction exists outside our reality; we are using it as a lens to look at the fundamental activity of scientific practice. The movie 2001 still has power even though we are in 2014, as does 1984. The question then becomes why science fiction, and what is the relationship between science fiction and ubiquitous computing? There is a long relationship between scientific research and speculative fiction, as evidenced by the fact that fan-restored prop of the original Star Trek shuttle (after which the space shuttle was named) is now on permanent display at NASA’s Houston space flight center. In Constance Penley’s book NASA/Trek [1], she explores the ways in which NASA engineers have been influenced by Star Trek, and in particular the cultural imagination of progress, not the technology or science itself. Closer to our roots in ubiquitous computing, Eric Paulos organized a workshop on Urban Computing at which Peter Lunenfeld from ArtCenter (and latterly UCLA) complaining how little scientists and engineers felt there was to be learned from literature as a touchstone, and suggested that those works were much more interesting than your average user study. More recent interests in what have been labeled ‘‘design fictions’’—as highlighted in the work of Tony Dunne and Fiona Raby, Julian Bleecker, and others—have shown the power to taking Lunenfeld’s insight to heart. Those two came together and combined with the way in which research in ubicomp is in some senses fictive: we imagine worlds, we imagine users. It is not really participatory design—it cannot be participatory design, because we are always imagining future users, since by very definition they do not exist yet. As such, this body of work collected in this issue starts to question some of the assumptions that we have around what makes up science fiction. J. Kaye (&) Yahoo Labs, Sunnyvale, CA, USA e-mail: jofish@yahoo-inc.com