I’ve been meaning to post this for a week now. It’s a great (and lengthy) article with Adam Greenfield who is Nokia’s head of design direction for user interface and services.
Q: Are there ways we could design ubiquitous systems that might support personal autonomy?
A: …When given some kind of real-time overview of all of the options available to you in a given time, place and context – and especially if that comes wrapped up in some kind of visualization that makes anomaly detection a matter of instantaneous gestalt, to be grasped in a single glance – your personal autonomy is tremendously enhanced… you don’t head out to the bus stop until your phone tells you a bus is a minute away, and you don’t walk down the street where more than some threshold number of muggings happen – in fact, by default it doesn’t even show up on your maps…