Ubiquitous Lingering Technologies: What's Left Behind by the Past “Proximate Futures”?

Abstract

Ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) has long been driven by what Bell and Dourish describe as the “proximate future”—a temporal orientation that ties technological imagination to the promise of what is just about to arrive. This paper asks what happens when those proximate futures pass. Drawing on a long-term ethnography tracing Shanghai's public-private smart aging initiatives, we show how ubicomp technologies such as smart beds and service robots persist after their constitutive visions have faded. Often unused yet impossible to remove, these systems linger as material and social presences in everyday life. We introduce lingering as an analytic that expands ubicomp's temporal orientation by shifting attention from speculative futures to the persistence of past ones. We further propose an ethics of lingering that extends responsibility beyond design and use to the material and temporal endurance of technologies that remain in the world. Together, this paper reorients ubicomp toward its own temporal residues, inviting the field to reflect not only on the futures it imagines and builds, but also on the technological worlds and obligations that those visions leave behind.