The Econonomist of 28th April in its “Special report on telecoms” in an article entitled “The hidden revolution: What you don’t see will need careful watching” uses the word Seamfulness. They refer us to Adam Greenfield’s book “The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing” in which he argues that the computing industry should not strive to make everything Seamless. The article is concerned with the oncoming revolution of RFID tags, which may soon be implanted in everything from our passports to the clothing we wear and could even be embedded within a person without them being aware of it.
Greenfield credits Mark Weiser as alerting us to the dangers of things being “without seams”, of not knowing where the borders are, and he favored “seamfulness, with beautiful seams” where the design of systems encourages users to understand them. Greenfield likes the honesty of Seamfulness – as he puts it “good fences make good neighbours.
The “New Now Know How” blog (wonderful title I think) has a discussion on the invisibility and visibility of Seamlessness and Seamfulness.
New Now Know How
There has been an orthodoxy that ubiquitous computing systems (ubicomp) should be seamless. This is questioned in an article “Seamful ubiquity: Beyond seamless integration ” by Ian MacColl (et.al) from Glasgow University. Seamful ubiquity
ETYM
Seam (noun) – a line where two edges join.
Seamless (adj.) – without a seam or seams, uninterrupted, smooth.
Seamlessness (noun) – the quality of having no visible seams. Wikipedia
Seamful (adj) – as in “Seamful design” (over 25 thousand hits in google).
Seamfulness (noun) – the quality of having visible seams.
The formal (grammatical) structure is similar to that of Joy:
Joy (noun) – a vivid emotion of pleasure.
Joyless (adj.)
Joylessness (noun)
Joyful (adj.)
Joyfulness (noun)
Nowadays Seam is also the name of a framework for building Web 2.0 applications and Joy is a program for annotating protein sequence alignments so even Joy is not free of technological connotations. However, on the whole the deriviatives of the word Seam have been adopted by the internet world as technical and design terms referring to the sometimes ubiquituous, and certainly ever present, new technologies, whereas the deriviatives of Joy do not show this tendency! The word Seam gets 11 million hits in google but the word Joy surpasses it splendidly with 130 million. It appears that the global English speaking internet community is more interested in discussing the invisible “vivid emotion of pleasure” than in understanding the visible lines where two edges join!
Joyfulness gets 216 thousand hits in google and Seamfulness gets a mere 351. However, I would bet that the word Seamfulness will overtake its grammatical sister within a few years, once the implications of the ubiquitous RFID become apparant to the public who are, at present, so blissfully unaware of its invisible presence.
