Our daily life environments are starting to contain

By admin on October 29th, 2007

Our daily life environments are starting to contain an increasing
number of displays in various formats and supporting different
functionalities and interaction styles.
In such interactive environments people can move around in a display continuum
rather then sit at a desktop behind their screens, handle physical
as well as digital objects at the same time, and interact on
shared displays in co-located or remote collaboration. Thus, our
contexts of interaction tend to get a more and more hybrid
nature, where physical and digital artifacts blend together. This
will most likely affect the way in which we interact with
architectural space, with information and with each other in the
near future. A holistic understanding of context, in this sense,
requires looking at interaction as embodied [3], thus taking into
account its social as well as physical aspects. Hybrid IT
artifacts need to provide physical, cognitive, as well as social
affordances in order to enable users to interact
and communicate in such hybrid contexts.

The research focuses on the design of affordances for digital
information in scenarios of ubiquitous computing. Here I
present the Living Cookbook appliance: in this project we
explore the introduction of digital display technology into the
kitchen environment. In this paper I look at the complexity of
the cooking context and I consider how the introduction of
technology in the kitchen can affect the cooking experience. I
provide a design perspective and point out the main challenges
and potentials of bringing computing technology into contexts
of everyday life.