Interactive systems in domestic environments

This paper describes the development of novel user interface concepts for an in-home environment. If interaction devices at various places in a house are interconnected through an in-home network, people are no longer restricted to a location where a device with a particular functionality is located. Instead, they are even able to start an activity (such as watching a movie or making a videophone call) in one room and continue it in another room of the house. Two user interface concepts are described that enable this relocation of activities. In addition, a user interface is described for local activity handling, such as beginning and ending activities and switching between activities. We followed an iterative and user-centered approach with several evaluations during the process. A fully working in-home network was implemented and evaluated with both UI experts and potential end-users. Keywords User interface concepts, in-home digital network, tangible user interface, physical icon...

2006

Based on the results of a 3-year interdisciplinary study, this article presents an approach in which proactive information technology was introduced into homes, and discusses the derived design principles from a human-centered perspective. The application of proactive computing in homes will face particularly sensitive conditions, as familiar and reliable household elements remain strongly preferred. Since there is considerable resistance towards the increase of information technology in homes, both the calm system behaviors and the degree of variety in aesthetic designs will play major roles in the acceptance of proactive technology. If proactive technology will be an embedded part of a home's structures and furniture, it needs to blend with the normal, cozy standards of a real living environment and aim to enhance the homeyness or the key social and aesthetic qualities of homes.

Proceedings of the companion publication of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing - CSCW Companion '14, 2014

When developing new ICT systems and applications for domestic environments, rich qualitative approaches improve the understanding of the user's integral usage of technology in their daily routines and thereby inform design. This knowledge will often be reached through in-home studies, strong relationships with the users and their involvement in the design and evaluation process. However, whilst this kind of research offers valuable context insights and brings out unexpected findings, it also presents methodological, technical and organizational challenges for the study design and its underlying cooperation processes. In particular, due to heterogeneous users in households in terms of technology affinity, individual needs, age distribution, gender, social constellations, personal role assignment, project expectations, etc. it produces particular demands to collaborate with users in the design process and thereby exposes a range of practical challenges. The full-day workshop wishes to identify these practical challenges, discuss best practice and develop a roadmap for sustainable relationships for design with users.

Australasian Journal of Information Systems, 2004

This paper analyses the use of media and material in private homes based on empirical studies in a project on designing interactive domestic environments. Based on the analyses we propose a Domestic Hypermedia infrastructure (DoHM) combining spatial, context-aware and physical hypermedia to support collaborative structuring and ubiquitous presentation of materials in private homes. With DoHM we propose establishing new relationship between digital and physical hyperspaces, folding hyperspaces into the physical space of the household. Thus we strive to combine the qualities of physical domestic materials and spaces with the flexibility and dynamics of digital hyperspaces. We propose a variety of new ubiquitous home appliances called MediaWall, MediaTable, MediaTray and MediaPort, which address these issues.

Cognition, Technology & Work, 2003

This paper describes extensive user studies that have been conducted to understand what 'home' actually means to people, and to find out how people would like to live in their 'dream home'. Based on these studies, three innovative user-system interaction concepts were developed that help to enhance people's home experience.

2007

Acknowledgements 121

Based on the results of a 3-year interdisciplinary study, this article presents an approach in which proactive information technology was introduced into homes, and discusses the derived design principles from a human-centered perspective. The application of proactive computing in homes will face particularly sensitive conditions, as familiar and reliable household elements remain strongly preferred. Since there is considerable resistance towards the increase of information technology in homes, both the calm system behaviors and the degree of variety in aesthetic designs will play major roles in the acceptance of proactive technology. If proactive technology will be an embedded part of a home's structures and furniture, it needs to blend with the normal, cozy standards of a real living environment and aim to enhance the homeyness or the key social and aesthetic qualities of homes.

Sensors, 2019

The emergence of the Ambient Intelligence (AmI) paradigm and the proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and services unveiled new potentials for the domain of domestic living, where the line between "the computer" and the (intelligent) environment becomes altogether invisible. Particularly, the residents of a house can use the living room not only as a traditional social and individual space where many activities take place, but also as a smart ecosystem that (a) enhances leisure activities by providing a rich suite of entertainment applications, (b) implements a home control middleware, (c) acts as an intervention host that is able to display appropriate content when the users need help or support, (d) behaves as an intelligent agent that communicates with the users in a natural manner and assists them throughout their daily activities, (e) presents a notification hub that provides personalized alerts according to contextual information, and (f) becomes an intermediary communication center for the family. This paper (i) describes how the "Intelligent Living Room" realizes these newly emerged roles, (ii) presents the process that was followed in order to design the living room environment, (iii) introduces the hardware and software facilities that were developed in order to improve quality of life, and (iv) reports the findings of various evaluation experiments conducted to assess the overall User Experience (UX).

2003

This paper presents the development of a user-oriented framework to support the user reconfiguration of ubiquitous domestic environments. We present a lightweight component model that allows a range of devices to be readily interconnected and an editor to support users in doing this. The editor discovers available ubiquitous components and presents these to users as jigsaw pieces that can be dynamically recombined. The developed editor allows users to assemble lightweight sensors, devices such as displays and larger applications in order to meet their particular needs.

European Conference on …, 2009

A challenging topic for cognitive ergonomics and cognitive engineering is the development of smart applications and devices which apply some “intelligence” of the situations, i.e. commonsense knowledge about the occupants of the household, their individual and collective routines, their expected patterns of behavior. Most people spend more time at home than in any other place, including work places, but few studies have been conducted on how new context-aware technologies could support people in their everyday life. Spaces that subtly reconfigure themselves according to their occupants and use can cause rejection or acceptance, depending on how intelligently they are designed. In this paper we describe a descriptive framework for contextual activities that aims at supporting collective thinking about the design of services for the domestic users.