INTERACT2005 Special: When Interactions happen without You

"Trust and Incidental Interaction: Would you let a Talking Paper Clip run YOUR Home?" was the name of the most challenging panel at the INTERACT 2005 conference, held in Rome towards the end of last year. All four speakers' presentations had interesting aspects and made a unique contribution to discussions about the future of user-centred design. To do justice to the ideas, each is being given its own story. Today, UN features Alan Dix of Lancaster University's Computing Department explaining his answer to the panel question.

Dix began by asking how many computers we thought we had at home. More than five? Most of us put up our hand and laughed. Then he knew he was talking to the initiated. This panel was not about desktops or laptops; it was all about the little computers inside things and what they are increasingly going to be able to do for us, with us and in spite of us.

Dix introduced the 'intentional spectrum':
* intentional is when you press the light switch to make the light come on;
* expected is when automatic doors open, or an automatic light switch functions because it has sensed your presence;
* incidental is when, unbeknownst to you, the air conditioning increases because you have come into a room.

Usual human – computer interaction is high attention, high intention, he said. But, claiming this was the most radical change in HCI ever, he looked to the increasing number of low intention kinds of interaction and how they would lead to new models, architectures and designs where attention levels might range but much would happen without a person's direct involvement.

Designing for these incidental interactions would need a richer representation of both the world of devices and wider ecological concerns, he said.

He looked at the complexities of designing a system that was both able to interpret data from the environment and then support the tasks that it understood to be in process. There would be uncertainty both in sensing and then in applying the information.

And he introduced the idea of 'appropriate intelligence' – simple heuristics combined with the right interactions. His rule, he said, is that a system's behaviour should be right as much as possible; when it is right, it should be good; and when it doesn't get it right, it 'shouldn't mess you up'.

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