It’s A Jungle Out There: Toward Design Heuristics For Ambient Intelligence Ecologies

A growing acknowledgement within a range of disciplines has arisen concerning the necessity of changing our approach to design of IT. The main reasons for this are the increasing challenges involved in designing and maintaining IT systems that are more pervasive and complex than ever, and a growing need for better and more flexible assistance from an omnipresent technology. This paper argues for a bio-mimetic design heuristic for Ambient Intelligence technology, with a specific focus on organizational and developmental issues provided by an interactivist model. The interactivist view provides a model for better functionality together with optimized infrastructure by describing intelligence as rising from adaptive self-organizing and selfmaintaining capabilities. On the basis of the interactivist approach this paper sketches general design heuristics for AmbI and points to future research issues to be dealt with.