My first book, Everyware (2006), is still available for purchase from Amazon.
As its subtitle suggests, Everyware concerned an epochal change I saw unfolding in the world, prior even to the advent of the smartphone: the emergence of a computing without computers, where information processing is almost imperceptible, but conditioning experience and possibility everywhere around us.
The prospect was one of smart buildings, smart furniture, smart clothing, even smart bathtubs — of networked street signs and self-describing soda cans. Of Minority Report-style gestural interfaces, and RFID tags embedded in everything from credit cards to the family pet.
Not all of these things came to pass in quite the way I envisioned, but the book’s 81 brief theses nevertheless do a pretty good job of exploring the implications and the stakes of this turn toward ubiquitous computing. I’ve long since disavowed the enthusiasm for unlimited connection the book is saturated in, but remain proud of how clear it was on what we were in the midst of doing to our world — how clear, and how early.
(Everyware is also available in French.)