Tiina Kymäläinen

A User-Centric View of Intelligent Environments: User Expectations, User Experience and User Role in Building Intelligent Environments

Our everyday environments are gradually becoming intelligent, facilitated both by technological development and user activities. Although large-scale intelligent environments are still rare in actual everyday use, they have been studied for quite a long time, and several user studies have been carried out. In this paper, we present a user-centric view of intelligent environments based on published research results and our own experiences from user studies with concepts and prototypes. We analyze user acceptance and users’ expectations that affect users’ willingness to start using intelligent environments and to continue using them. We discuss user experience of interacting with intelligent environments where physical and virtual elements are intertwined. Finally, we touch on the role of users in shaping their own intelligent environments instead of just using ready-made environments. People are not merely “using” the intelligent environments but they live in them, and they experience the environments via embedded services and new interaction tools as well as the physical and social environment. Intelligent environments should provide emotional as well as instrumental value to the people who live in them, and the environments should be trustworthy and controllable both by regular users and occasional visitors. Understanding user expectations and user experience in intelligent environments, and providing users with tools to influence the environments can help to shape the vision of intelligent environments into meaningful, acceptable and appealing service entities for all those who live and act in them.

Utilizing Experience Goals in Design of Industrial Systems

The core idea of experience-driven design is to define the intended experience before functionality and technology. This is a radical idea for companies that have built their competences around specific technologies. Although many technology companies are willing to shift their focus towards experience-driven design, reports on real-life cases about the utilization of this design approach are rare. As part of an industry-led research program, we introduced experience-driven design to metal industry companies with experience goals as the key technique. Four design cases in three companies showed that the goals are useful in keeping the focus on user experience, but several challenges are still left for future research to tackle. This exploratory research lays ground for future research by providing initial criteria for assessing experience design tools. The results shed light on utilizing experience goals in industrial design projects and help practitioners in planning and managing the product design process with user experience in mind.

A creative prototype illustrating the ambient user experience of an intelligent future factory

This article introduces user experience research that has been carried out by evaluating a video-illustrated science fiction prototype with process control workers. Essentially, the prototype ‘A remote operator’s day in a future control center in 2025’ was aimed at discovering opportunities for new interaction methods and ambient intelligence for the factories of the future. The theoretical objective was to carry out experience design research, which was based on explicit ambient user experience goals in the nominated industrial work context. This article describes the complete creative prototyping process, starting from the initial user research that included evaluations of current work practices, technological trend studies and co-design workshops, and concluding with user research that assessed the final design outcome, the science fiction prototype. The main contribution of the article is on the ambient user experience goals, the creation process of the video-illustrated science fiction prototype, and on the reflection of how the experience-driven prototype was evaluated in two research setups: as video sequences embedded in a Web survey, and as interviews carried out with expert process control workers. For the science fiction prototyping process, the contribution demonstrates how the method may employ video-illustration as a means for future-oriented user experience research, and how complementary user-centered methods may be used to validate the results.

The design methodology for studying smart but complex do-it-yourself experiences

This article illustrates design-oriented human–computer interaction (HCI) research for creating do-it-yourself (DIY) experiences for emerging technologies. It contemplates the design objectives for the DIY construction processes through the lens of Ecological Approach to Smart Environments (EASE) and by exemplifying three case studies. The first case study introduces the design of the Home Control System of a nursing ecology for the aged. The second case study presents the Music Creation Tool research in music therapy ecology for those with disabilities, and the third study, Life Story Creation, presents a memorysharing application for elderly amateur writers. The article carefully considers the role of users in HCI research, who in the DIY context are expected to be active and motivated crafters and builders of their personal environments. The focus of research, the user experience studies, aims at supporting creating, configuring and sharing experiences within the constructed prototypes, and at determining the new experiences that emerge from the research. The concluding objective for the article is presenting of a design framework for involving the initiative domain owners to the DIY research.

Designing smart living for ageing Alice – and the persons next door

ABSTRACT This article presents the co-design and development process for a home control system in the context of a healthcare ecology for older people accessing care home services. The contribution of this article is threefold: (1) it presents a design-oriented, user-centred approach for studying intelligent environments (IE); (2) it describes an ontology-based architecture that provides the foundation for the system, and (3) it introduces a proof-of-concept tool for creating and customizing IE services. The article dedicates the system to ‘Alice’, a central persona created for the initial research scenarios, representing a new arrival at a residential care home. This article illustrates the multifaceted design process and considers the challenges of linking Alices ‘intelligent apartment’ to all the other apartments next to, and beyond, hers.

Introduction to the thematic issue on Human-centric computing and intelligent environments

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) and Intelligent environments (IEs) are characterized by information and communication technologies embedded so seamlessly into our physical environments and in various everyday objects that computer-enabled features will become a natural part of our living and working environments [6]. According to Cook and Das [4], the most critical feature that separates intelligent environments from environments that are merely user-controllable is their ability to model inhabitant behaviour. They determine that an intelligent environment is able to acquire and apply knowledge about the environment and its inhabitants in order to improve the inhabitants’ experience in that environment. The environment is thus willing to serve spontaneously and proactively, i.e. the environment senses the person’s needs and circumstances, and responds accordingly. In general, in the visions promoted by AmI and IEs, people are surrounded by intuitive interfaces and user-adaptive technologies; and the environments are capable of recognizing and proactively responding to the presence of different individuals in a seamless, unobtrusive and invisible way. Although these visions clearly place humans in the centre of their technology-mediated environments, the human-centred perspective of computer-based systems is still often neglected. Technologists – including computer scientists and engineers – frequently design and construct systems which perform efficiently, but may not provide their users with straightforward modes

Intention Awareness: A Vision Declaration and Illustrating Scenarios

This is a position paper that introduces intention awareness (IA) as a counterfactual approach for designing IA technologies. The approach distinguishes human intention as a premise for developing intention-aware systems. Intention-aware technologies utilise information about the users intentions to improve the services that are provided by the environment. The paper will initially define intention awareness as a concept, and subsequently introduce four scenarios that illustrate the approach.

Introduction to the Special Session: Design and Research for Advanced Human Augmentation

This special session has called for contributions that demonstrate research in advanced human augmentation. The introduction briefly describes how the concept is currently understood, and, in the creative science spirit, depicts how it may be understood in the more distant future. To explain this, the introduction presents a short science fiction prototype that illustrates how future co-creative intelligence will combine human technology with human intelligence by emphasizing the role of human centricity in the advanced human augmentation vision. To achieve an overview of how the vision is currently being pursued, this special session demonstrates contemporary research that advances the ideas. In the session the nominated contribution is limited to the industrial work context, training and mentoring, and assistive augmentation for the elderly and visually impaired. The technological focus is mainly on virtual/mixed/augmented realities, eye-tracking systems and head-mounted displays.

Preface: Human-centric computing and intelligent environments

In this book, I undertake a reexamination of rationality, or rational behavior, in the history of economic thought, review strands of scholarly criticisms of rationality, and develop defenses for the continued use of rationality in economic analysis. The emphasis will be on how economists have employed the rationality premise in the post-World War II era, during which time the premise became widely recognized for being at the core of fully formed neoclassical economics and during which time the premise has come under ever more serious attacks that, in no small way, have undermined the credibility of economics as a scientific endeavor (at least according to many behavioral psychologists and behavioral economists whose work will be reviewed later in this book). Economists are a diverse group, which means my reexamination of rationality must be confined. I have chosen to adopt the perspective on rationality that is generally represented by mainstream or (what I equate with) neoclassical economics, widely adopted in modern intermediate microeconomic theory textbooks. I give special attention to two methodological perspectives on rationality that have emanated from the modern Chicago school identified by history of thought economist Steven Medema (2008): The first Chicago perspective is best represented in Milton Friedman’s classic methodological essay (1953) and his textbook (1962), with Friedman focusing on the motivational force of rationality, or just self-interest, within market settings. The other perspective is best represented by George Stigler’s and Gary Becker’s textbooks written separately (Stigler 1952, last published in 1987 with significant evolved changes in the treatment of rationality; and Becker 1971a) and their joint methodological essay (1977), with Stigler and Becker accepting much of Friedman’s methodology but untying the rational behavior premise from narrowly confined market analysis and using the premise as the founding motivational force undergirding a method of thinking, with the application of the method no longer contained by subject matter (for example, business or markets outcomes). In giving shape to mainstream, neoclassical economics for purposes of this volume, I remain fully aware that any school of thought has boundaries that are fuzzy and changing, with adherents within the loosely defined school of thought differing significantly on many details of analysis (which is especially true of

Creating Scenes for an Intelligent Nursing Environment: Co-design and User Evaluations of a Home Control System

In this paper we describe the co-design process of a proof-of-concept home control system, and how it was carried out by utilising a user-centred design methodology. The aim was to develop a demonstrator of a home control system that supports elderly people in living more independently in their homes. The focus of the research was on the configuration tool of the environment, which was meant to be exploited in a nursing home. The home control system was intended to be used and configured by non-technologically versed users: mainly the care personnel, but also the inhabitants and their close relatives. The system was co-designed and evaluated at first with nurses, who were considered to be the local experts of the chosen ecosystem. The final web-based proof-of-concept system was evaluated with nurses and end-users.