Interactivism at Work Toward design heuristics for Ambient Intelligence

Designing IT is facing more challenges than ever. The increasingly pervasive and complex IT systems risk loosing their overall value if not designed more robustly and autonomous. In addition the IT colonization of most everyday practices requires a more adaptive assistance from the technology if the proliferation of IT is to be rendered meaningful. The challenges have been widely acknowledged within the IT research community and different disciplines call for a change of design strategy. Some point to the looming labor consuming maintenance of vast pervasive IT systems (Ganek, A. G. and Corbi, T. A 2003, Norman, D. A. et al. 2003) likely to dominate in the near future. Others to the need for IT that supports increasingly dynamic user practices (DeBruijn and Stathis 2003, Ducatel, K. et al. 2001, Harris and Henderson 2000, Kaasgaard forthcoming, Rheingold 2002). To meet both ‘internal’ (infrastructural and organizational) and ‘external’ (functional) challenges for improvements, IT has to be bestowed with adaptive capabilities – normally referred to as intelligent technology. Together with the growing embeddedness of IT into more parts of daily life this new technology is best captured as Ambient Intelligence (AmbI).