Site visit in Tampere on 30 January 2003

The coordination unit visited the Hypermedia Laboratory at the University of Tampere on 30 January 2003. Professors Franz Mäyrä and Jukka Vanhala gave a presentation of their PROACT project Living in Metamorphosis: Control and Awareness in a Proactive Home Environment (morphome).

The aim of the project is to study the design principles for applying proactive computing in a domestic environment: the design of intelligent media and smart products in homes and their interfaceswith intelligent materials.

The domestic environment is an important and challenging research area. Home applications have to serve very different kinds of people whose primary goals are in the areas of relaxation and social interaction. System control functions must also not encumber the residents; acceptability requires calm technology.

The project will try to answer questions like

Where should the intelligence be situated in a home?
Where and when are decisions taken to control the applications?
How is subjectivity (re)defined?

The interfaces of proactive technology should be integrated into existing products in order to avoid "panel madness". On the other hand, new functionalities must be communicated to the user, or otherwise, the technology will become both incomprehensible and ultimately unusable; users will resort to old ways of communicating with appliances and ignore new possibilities. The research question then is how to design comprehensible but non-disturbing interfaces that are integrated into a familiar environment.

Control can be offered to the user, to the home or to both. With the user in control, most tasks would be consciously triggered. On the other hand, with the home in control, most tasks would be automatically executed. A compromise would apply a learning model where either the user is adapting to the principles of the environment or the environment is trying to adapt to and learn from the user.

Obviously, different people want different things at home. Proactive applications should adapt their behaviour according to the person they serve at the moment. In this sense, recognising and tracking users are important features as well as using personal user profiles, both explicitly given by the user and automatically learned by tracking user activities. Applications should, on the other hand, also be ethically feasible and privacy maintained.

First year plans

During the first year, the project intends to make an on-site survey in homes of what kind of products would be feasible and acceptable. Information from this survey together with a survey of available technology will result in the first prototypes of proactive applications at the end of 2003. The first prototypes will be evaluated and used for a second generation of prototypes later on in the project. The nature of the prototypes is still open - perhaps intelligent cushions or sofas? - and remains to be determined by the user studies.

The three research teams will work closely together. The Hypermedia Laboratory and the Department of Product and Strategic Design will be responsible for producing design objectives and specifications of proactive applications, whereas the Institute of Electronics will apply the principles in the development of materials and technology.
More information

For more information, please see the newly established web pages of the project at http://www.uta.fi/hyper/projektit/morphome/ or contact Coordinator Frans Mäyrä at the Hypermedia Laboratory. The consortium consists of the following units and researchers:

• Hypermedia Laboratory, University of Tampere (UTA):
• Professor Frans Mäyrä, Professor Tere Vadén, Researcher Anne Soronen, Researcher Olli Sotamaa
• Personal Electronics Group, Institute of Electronics, Tampere University of Technology (TUT):
• Professor Jukka Vanhala, Researcher Jussi Mikkonen
• Department of Product and Strategic Design at the University of Art and Design, Helsinki (UIAH):
• Professor Ilpo Koskinen, Researcher Katja Battarbee

The project's web page at this site.