1 Do Social Computing Make You Happy? A Case Study on Nomadic Children in Mixed Environments Bent Guldbjerg Christensen Center for InteractiveSpaces, ISIS Katrinebjerg Åbogade 34, 8200 Århus N bentor@daimi.au.dk +458942 5658 ABSTRACT In this paper I describe a perspective on ambient, ubiquitous, and pervasive computing called the happiness perspective. By using the happiness perspective, the application domain and how the technology is used and experienced, becomes a central and integral part of perceiving ambient technology. I will use the perspective in a case study on field test experiments with nomadic children in mixed environments using the eBag system. Author Keywords Ambient computing, quality of life, social computing ACM Classification Keywords H.1.2 User/Machine Systems INTRODUCTION As the visions of ambient, ubiquitous, and pervasive computing in some aspects are coming very close to a description of our everyday lives using computing technology, a critical view upon the consequences of implementing these visions, would be appropriate and interesting. For instance with the CoolTown project [2] Hewlett- Packard presents their visions for pervasive computing where home, schools, workplaces and your everyday life in general is digitally enhanced and connected through the Internet. Mobile devices provide fast access to personal material, for instance a presentation (the CoolTown video shows a business women transferring her presentation material up on a large wall display) and even makes studying a joy (represented in the video by a girl learning Spanish from her voice activated wrist watch). But, the CoolTown vision also assumes a lack of privacy that is quite disturbing, e.g., exemplified by the same little girl using a public display on the refrigerator to receive a message from her teacher and consequently getting her test scores broadcast on it, or Bob who is loudly and repeatedly congratulated by the technology he comes in contact with because he received a reward. Another example is the vision video the Knowledge Navigator from Apple [5] where a professor enters his home and turns on his computer. The computer is a book sized tablet, where an agent in the shape of a bow tie wearing butler assists him in collecting data for his talk on global warming. The compiling of data is accomplished in a very natural conversational manner between the professor and his agent butler as it would have been another human being he was talking to. Furthermore the butler has a perfect overview of the professor’s calendar and do even participate in a conversation between the professor and a colleague by revealing that his is late with his talk preparation. In this vision video the software agent has a quite amazing speech recognition and understanding of human behavior and relations. It also seems it bit clumsy that the professor has to explain and instruct the agent to do certain tasks instead of just doing it himself right away. But what is more disturbing is the in-depth knowledge the agent has on the professor combined with the agent’s seemingly autonomous behavior. Who or what is in control here? These visions present future goals for technological advances, but do as well present (or reveal) a value set for the people engaging the technology. These values often reflect the vision makers’ own perspectives on quality of life in an ideal world. So, to be able to criticize and discuss visions like the above further, I will have to define my own set of values for quality of life. In this paper I will present a set of values for quality of life for ambient technologies and use them to evaluated one of our own prototype experiments using ambient technology conducted in the Center of Interactive Spaces.