Task modeling for ambient intelligent environments: design support for situated task executions

The design of interactive systems for an ambient intelligent environment poses many challenges because of the great diversity in devices the user has control of and the user's situation imposed by the environment. Although task-centered interface design is an established approach for traditional form-based and even for multi-device user interfaces, this design approach is, in its current form, not ready for the design of user interfaces for ambient intelligent environments. In this paper we propose a task-centered approach to design interaction mechanisms for ambient intelligent environments by means of visualization and simulation. We focus on three different concepts that are important to support this approach: situated task allocations, user interface distributions and visualization of context influences. Because the execution of a task depends strongly on the situation or context of use, the consequences of a context change on the execution of a task specification should be communicated with the task designer during the design process. The designer should be able to define the possibilities to execute a task while taking into account constraints imposed by the environment of the user. A tool to support this approach using visualization of the environment and simulation of the interface configurations is introduced.