CHI 2003: Digital ID requires Semi-Permanent Roles for Flexibility

Norman Lewis, director of technology research at Freeserve, stressed the need for good design as the ubiquity of computers and networks transforms our environment into a 'connected eco-system'. Good design is human-centred not technologically-centred or technologically-determined, he said.

There will be new synergies and dependencies as networks develop, he told the CHI 2003 development consortium on Mass Communication and HCI. The particular challenge in developing ambient networks will be the integration of the computational power of surrounding devices and networks to ensure simplicity and ease of use. This must go hand in hand with the creation of a security infrastructure as part of the service platform to ensure users' confidence, especially as personalised services become the norm.

Intelligent user interfaces will allow people to control and interact with the environment in a natural and personalised way, he said, but their use would demand satisfactory answers to issues of digital identity.

Digital ID is complex – ideally involving both permanent and semi-permanent 'personal service profiles' - in other words, there will be aspects that stay fixed in people's lives, such as being a subject of the British nation, with driving licence, bank account and passport. But there will also be those aspects that change as situations alter and semi-permanent profiles allow users to have many roles, rather than just their single fixed identity.

This flexibility could be coupled with services that know where they are and who is using them, and in which role. These 'presence services' should be location aware, personal preference aware, time sensitive, bandwidth aware and terminal capability aware, said Norman. They could thus be contextual and task driven, supported by an adjustable personal profile based upon user roles (eg work, family), community user/service profile (eg soccer, art), user behaviour (update of user/service profile), context (what do I do right now and where I do it), creating of content (eg information for my sports community), and localisation (eg local services).

But Lewis qualified this vision with concern about the security infrastructure that must accompany it.

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