Design Principles for a New Generic Digital Habitat
Desktops and applications are the basic concepts for people and developers in mobile and personal computers. Pages and hyperlinks are similar basic building blocks in the Web. TV consists of channels and programs. DIEM paper 'Design Principles for a New Generic Digital Habitat' (Pohjola, O-P., Aalto University) dives into the fundamental question about what are the basic concepts in smart environments, that is, environments in which physical and digital parts are connected, in which information is generally shared and that provide general interoperability for devices and services. The paper will be presented in CHI 2011 (Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems) on may 2011.
The paper presents the key principles for designing such basic concepts. The starting point is that these concepts should form an environment where people are able to feel safe, in control, capable, and social. This contrasts with frustration that many feel today due to fundamental interoperability problems and shortcomings in the current digital environments. Because of this the selected approach was to design a new generic digital habitat concept, a new paradigm that is able to succeed and extend the current device, desktop and web paradigms.
The key idea is that the digital part of the habitat is based on the same abstract concepts as our physical habitat. This poses three questions: what are the basic concepts of our physical habitat, what are their abstractions that are then shared with the digital habitat, and what are the special characteristics of the digital habitat. Additional questions are: how does the new habitat relate to existing environments, what are interfaces between the physical and digital habitats, and how do developers extend the new habitat. These questions are discussed in the paper.
The paper provides a conceptual view point to DIEM, and to ICT generally. This same view point drove the original design of the desktop metaphor at Xerox PARC and was the key factor to its success. From this view point and guided by the principles presented in the paper, the DIEM interoperability solution and platform has all the potential to be the foundation of a new paradigm in ICT.