Build What You Use

T prove success in ubiquitous computing research, you must implement your ideas and deploy them in support of a work practice or community activity. Anything less, and the design’s utility will always be doubted, even if the core engineering is outstanding. The phrase “build what you use and use what you build” was part of Xerox Palo Alto Research Center’s culture during the 1980s’ heyday of paperless offi ce research. This culture produced the now-ubiquitous personal workstation, local-area network, and bitmapped display. When I joined PARC in the early ’90s, building was still very much a part of the culture. With Mark Weiser at the helm of PARC’s Computer Science Laboratory, we were encouraged to design ubiquitous computing systems, build them, and learn from them. This turned out to be much more diffi cult in practice than I fi rst imagined, as we struggled to determine what users wanted and what we should build.