Such insights challenged Intel's vision of a world of "smart homes" and a chip-driven lifestyle, Dr. Bell said, which assumes that users are secular. In those visions, there's no point at which residents stop to pray, visit a church, or have a moment of internal reflection. All this prompted her to ask David Tanenhaus, Intel's vice president of research: "What if our vision of ubiquitous computing is so secular, so profoundly embedded in a set of Western discourses, that we've created a vision of the world that shuts out a percentage of people in a way we can't really even begin to articulate?"Posted by ronlusk at May 6, 2004 01:17 PM...
For instance, the Korean electronics company LGE has introduced a mobile phone with an embedded compass to allow Muslim users to locate the direction of Mecca using Global Positioning System technology. Myung Whoon Lee, a senior LGE designer, said the company sought to design something "whose concept is reflected in the situation or culture of its actual place."