As ubiquitous computing has grown as a field, so too have the narratives around both ubicomp’s origins and how those origins impact its futures. In this special issue of Personal & Ubiquitous Computing, we seek to articulate those multiple voices and histories reflecting these multiple origins, each of which has a story to tell about the history of ubiquitous computing. These histories reside in multiple fields, from computer science and informatics, to history of science and STS, to design and urban planning—to name a few—as well as ubicomp’s new instantiations, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), smart cities, the architecture of the cloud and mobile computing.

The questions of the origins and influences of ubicomp garner more than passing academic interest. Since Mark Weiser’s 1991 article, and in the context of a growing role for research informed by a wide variety of user-focused approaches, the idea of ubicomp has grown from experiments in the laboratory, to a field of research for computer scientists and informatics scholars, to inspiration for a new breed of designers and technologists. Today, it is the burgeoning mainstream in an increasingly connected world. This journal, Personal & Ubiquitous Computing was founded in 1997, and the Ubicomp conference, ubicomp.org, has flourished and grown since its founding in 2001. In the last few years, the term internet of things (IoT) has become more widespread, reflecting a renewed interest in ubicomp outside of the academy and research, and simultaneously, the voices, epistemologies and academic traditions involved with ubicomp have become more varied.

We hope this special issue will motivate new and better ways to “do computing”—to enable different kinds of discussions and collaborations to advance discussion around ubiquitous computing. While many readers of PUC have been steeped in ubicomp for years, if not a decade or two, the concept of ubiquitous computing is still quite new to many of the fields and disciplines it touches. We aim to connect disparate fields, not only ubicomp, HCI and computer science, but also verging into communications, architecture, science and technology studies, and design. Certainly, part of that interest comes from our own backgrounds: Jofish Kaye has a Ph.D. in Information Science with an emphasis in Science & Technology Studies and is currently Principal Research Scientist at Mozilla, a nonprofit focused on improving the open internet; and Molly Wright Steenson holds a Ph.D. in Architecture, writes about the history of AI in architecture and design and is a design professor at Carnegie Mellon University. We both are keenly interested in bridging disciplines, in finding new approaches for researching and sharing histories and narratives. We also wanted to explore what happens when we develop a history that doesn’t try to do the (in Donna Haraway’s words) “god trick of seeing everything from nowhere,” but instead that seeks to play with partial and situated pictures, knowledge, configurations and practices.

In this special issue, we want to address some core questions. What went into the creation of ubicomp? How was ubicomp configured and refigured? Marc Weiser, of course, plays a central role in ubicomp’s creation myth. But what else was—and from today’s perspective, is—present? What kinds of human and disciplinary configurations and collaborations made ubicomp possible? In considering the multiple presences of ubicomp, what then is absent from ubicomp narratives? And how might some of these presences and absences be brought to light in this special issue?

Just as ubicomp is a hybrid discipline, so too are the approaches of the authors in this special issue. None of papers in this special issue try to be traditional histories, and none of the authors claim to be traditional historians. In their narratives of process and progress, the authors in this special issue may make different epistemological assumptions than a historian might—but this provides opportunities to create different kinds of knowledge than a historian is able to create. We found this hybrid, situational approach to be an appropriate method for ubicomp, a discipline that came from the intersection of computer science, the social sciences, HCI, design, architecture and beyond.