Intelligence Comes from Within—Personality as a UI Paradigm for Smart Spaces

The buzzword “smart home” promises an intelligent, helpful environment in which technology makes life easier, simpler or safer for its inhabitants. On a technical level, this is currently achieved by many networked devices interacting with each other, working on shared protocols and standards. From a user experience (UX) perspective, however, the interaction with such a collection of devices has become so complex that it currently rather stands in the way of widespread adoption and use. So far, it does not seem likely that a common user interface (UI) concept will emerge as a quasi-standard, as the desktop interface did for graphical UIs. Therefore, our research follows a different approach. Instead of many singular intelligent devices, we envision a UI concept for smart environments that integrates diverse pieces of technology in a coherent mental model of an embodied “room intelligence” (RI). RI will combine smart machinery, mobile robotic arms and mundane physical objects, thereby blurring the line between the physical and the digital world. The present paper describes our vision and emerging research questions and presents the initial steps of technical realization.