In 2009, ART+COM joined the Connected Living Research Group and has since participated in a number of projects dealing with Smart Home environments. In the spirit of design research and speculative design, ART+COM created prototypes for ad-hoc interaction with household appliances via mobile devices, the sharing and pooling of resources in the home environment, the visualisation of sensor data, and the monitoring of health and diet. ART+COM developed innovative processes in interaction design, information visualisation and the development of mobile apps based on current web standards.
In addition to the development and prototypal implementation of functional user interfaces with specific features, these projects generated new directions for research in the field of Spatial User Interaction, leveraging mobile technologies in novel ways and triggering the development and experimental testing of fundamental design approaches to Calm Technology, Ambient Interaction and Experience Design. The implementation is based on standard architectures and technologies for web apps, i.e. HTML5, Javascript, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics). User interfaces are thus platform independent and can be accessed via a browser, without the need to develop and maintain native versions for various operating systems.
The know-how accumulated in these projects, and the tools prototypically implemented for user interfaces, interaction design and information visualisation, are currently being used in several of ART+COM’s projects involving mobile devices.
The following projects were funded by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy and Federal Ministry of Education and Research in the context of Connected Living: Forschungscampus Connected Technologies, SEDICMA, Gesundheitscoach. The research project UHCI – Universal Home Control Interface runs until March 2015.
