Designing for Serendipity: Supporting End-User Configuration of Ubiquitous Computing Environments

Abstract

The future world of ubiquitous computing is one in which we will be surrounded by an ever-richer set of networked devices and services. In such a world, we cannot expect to have available to us specific applications that allow us to accomplish every conceivable combination of devices that we might wish. Instead, we believe that many of our interactions will be through highly generic tools that allow end-user discovery, configuration, interconnection, and control of the devices around us. This paper presents a design study of such an environment, intended to support serendipitous, opportunistic use of discovered network resources. We present an examination of a generic browser-style application built on top of an infrastructure developed to support arbitrary recombination of devices and services, as well as a number of challenges we believe to be inherent in such settings.