I have mentioned the Centre for Pervasive Health Care in an earlier post in relation to DAIMA’s work and the Centre for Pervasive Computing (CfPC) all at Arhus University and strongly linked to the Alexandra Institute and the Katrinebjerg Complex- the centre is implicated with a number of other partners on a project by project basis as is the case with many of the Northern European examples of Institutions I have looked at. I return mainly to account for the time I have spent trying to understand the programming approach of the Activity Based Computing project. When I first looked to this project I dismissed it somewhat arbitrarily in the face of recent developments in online collaborative engines and server based applications (AKA Web 2.0). This was premature – the ABC project is a a step ahead not a step behind that trend for centralization and the work they have done on the necessary technical requirements for the development of distributed and pervasive computing-or as they describe it ‘Activity Based Computing’ is interesting in its detailed account of the requirements for such a style of computing to be realized (ABC). What the ABC project is aiming for is a context sensitive distribution of applications and data. The hospital provides an ideal problematic space for ‘bench-testing’ (or perhaps bench-pressing) the mobility of data. In the post that follows I try and tease out a theoretical perspective from the very pragmatic approach to Activity Based Computing taken by CfPH. I’m really trying to work out the interesting cultural/ecological implications that I think this work indicates.
ABC approaches (ICT) development from an ‘activity’ rather than ‘utility’ based perspective. This means moving away from the assumptions of a desktop paradigm and associated layer(s) of abstraction. We have gotten very used to this way of working (spatial information metaphors) but when documents and activities becomes more mobile – more likely to move between applications, instances of applications, platforms, mediums, between users, and finally between utilities (that require differing ‘perspectives’ on those documents or applications) the desktop paradigm becomes more cumbersome. In fact many of the older spatial metaphors with which we originally structured the developing information space (of the network, the personal computer) are in the process of being fundamentally undermined by meta-data systems that provide for more recombinant mobility – a single organ (file, routine) can be central to more than one organism in the datascape – a document is not so much some ‘thing’ to be finally categorized, to be given a final context, as it is a zone of ‘torsional coalescence’ capable of dynamically generating ‘context’ according the potential interactions and/or requirements of particular bodies or the concret spaces that those body’s inhabit. A concrete example here is the way ‘tags’ or ‘meta-tagging’ systems upset the extended and hierarchical ‘Folders’ metaphor. Tagging and the Folksonomies are both exemplars and evidence-of the usefulness and problems that occur as we move to a less spatially coherent or grounded taxonomy.
While the Activity Based Computing project doesn’t voice its aims in such theoretical terms these issues nonetheless underwrite the project; How do we facilitate the mobility of data in concrete space – how do we lend the molecular mobility of data a concrete/useful molar coherence? The CfPH’s approach is grounded in the concrete and time-critical environment of the hospital ward where effective collaboration saves time and pervasive computing might equate to a more pervasive distribution of skill/talent or simply put, better resource management.
Computing in health care evolves iteratively according to the identification of a need. This tends to leads over time to a complex perhaps disjunctive informations space – an information space always out of phase with itself. Pervasive computing in a Healthcare environment manifests within a diverse group of platforms, operating systems, devices, and knowledges will inevitable permeate each space. A hospital also provides the an architecture in which the mobility of data is critical and its coherent distribution essential given the mobility of bodies that inhabit that space. In a hospital the concrete is the only constant, everything else is fluid; patients, nurses, doctors, managers, services – information must also be coherently fluid. In fact in Healthcare the mobility of information should provide the relational glue on which the coherence of medical service is based.