Between the dazzle of a new building and its eventual corpse: assembling the ubiquitous home

This paper presents the development of a lightweight component model that allows user to manage the introduction and arrangement of new interactive services and devices in the home. The model is responsive to ethnographic studies of the interplay between the Space-plan or interior layout and Stuff or artefacts placed within the fabric of the home. Interaction techniques developed through user-participation enable household members -- rather than designers -- to configure and reconfigure interactive devices and services to meet local needs. As a result, we have developed a tablet-based editor that discovers available ubiquitous components and presents these to users as 'jigsaw pieces' that can be dynamically assembled and recombined.

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