Once or twice a year, I have the pleasure of reading something which seems to so effortlessly describe a vision of the near future that is neither fantastical nor mundane, but intuitively right. I happened across two such items in the past few days, though only taken together do they seem to draw back the curtain on some forbidden room that is not quite ready to be revealed. (It reminds me of a scene in Fun with a Stranger, from a collection of Richard Yates' stories that I'm reading, where a class of third grade children are waiting out in the hallway while their teacher prepares the classroom for a party, the day before Chirstmas break is to begin. They are filled with "a special tension," and when one of them cathces a peak inside, the excitement spreads.)

The first of these was a site by Vodafone passed along to me by a designer collegue of mine. And the second was an essay by Adam Greenfield which I happened upon by chance. It appears this month on boxes and arrows, which I frequent occassionally (a great source for templates for developing personas, among other things.)

Vodafone clearly has a stake in ubiquitous computing (I'm somewhat loath to accept the abbreviated "ubicomp" - it sounds too much like something out of a William Gibson novel.) Their vision of the future presents some very compelling aspects - most notably the use of materials and devices which have been developed already and which may only be a year or two away from production. There future is worn on your wrist, and acts as a sort of central interaction hub through which you might might control various other devices in the vicinity. There are other interaction points as well - a dynamic, flexible, paper-like electronic display which interrupts your reading of the day's news with an incoming video mail message; an exercise bike that tracks your performance and allows you to anonymously "compete" with other people of similar athletic abilities around the world; a wall-sized, painted-on display that provides you with a panoramic display of a football game or a mountain stream, whichever suits your mood.

But I can think of at least two reasons why Vodafone's future world will be a collossal failure, if it materializes at all. The first is the lack of a business model sufficiently in keeping with the advanced technological vision presented. While ubiquitous devices seamlessly integrate with one another, they do so as channels through which "digital services" are "delivered" to you wherever you are, provided you select from one of the three available options. I'll be gracious enough to go along with the fantasy and not refer to Vodafone as a telephone company, even though their thinking is clearly reflective of that ancient breed. More charitably they might be called a communications company, but still they seem to think in terms of "mobile infotainment services", personalized content, and per-usage charges. Their vision glosses over the interface into these services when it talks about them at all - the nuts and bolts which bring together disparate data from one point on the network to another. Vodafone, like its breatheren, see itself as the delivery mechanism - i.e., the gatekeeper - and assumes that with control of the pipe through which the data must travel comes control of the delivery mechanism. The Baby Bells thought this too, and could see only dollar signs in providing high speed internet access through their copper lines. Now VOIP is entering the mainstream, and rapidly canabilizing the pay-per-use business model which supports the maintenance of those thin copper wires.

But more importantly, Vodafone and companies like it will fail because they are ignoring the importance of a compassionate interface, and more importantly the behavioral model which governs its use. And here is where the second piece comes in: All watched over by machines of loving grace. Providing first the context in which unquitous computing might wreak havoc, and then presenting design guidelines through which it might be prevented from doing so, Adam Greenfield lays out five rules of design which draw unappologetically from Issac Asimov's three rules of robotics, and which offer at least the hope of a future where machines everywhere are assistive and supportive, and not the "neverending hell of a voicemail menu the follows you wherever you go."

It is only in the context of these two opposing views: one of what will be - come hell or high water - and one of what could be, that I realized that the companies which "envision the future" are also the ones who seem so ill-equipped to deliver it with any sanity. One gets the feeling that Vodafone's Future will not so much be delivered as inflicted. Nit-picking though it may be, their site doesn't permit such usability niceties as deep-linking and user control. While they are far from universally-accepted, user interaction guidelines for the web are astonishingly well defined compared to the guidelines for ubiquitous computing. What possible hope is there that Vodafone, no spring chicken to the Internet, will do any better adhering to principles of compassionate design when it comes to ubiquitous interfaces than they are on the web?

Finally, there is a difference between user-centered design, and user-focused design. Information architects love to argue about semantics, but the real difference I'm trying to feel my way through is the one that juxtaposes a future where the user remains in control by default, and the one in which the user is but a target for an increasingly ubiquitous array of "on-demand" services and features. On whose demand are they available? Greenfield seems to hope, or plead, that in the absence of an explicit preference, the default state should be to "do no harm, let no harm come."

That one edict can provide a startling degree of clarity when it comes to making design decisions.