Domestic Pervasive Information Systems: End-user Programming of Digital Homes

This chapter presents the background to the development of the digital home of the future and the ways in which it might be controlled by the end user. We describe the technical background to the development of the digital home out of the ubiquitous availability of networks and devices. We then describe two different approaches to user control that are already under development-task-based computing (TBC) and Pervasive Interactive Programming (PiP). We discuss theoretical work on combining, formalizing, and visualizing these processes. In addition, we report on a user evaluation that demonstrates that nonexpert users find these methods simple, enjoyable, and useful. Although this chapter confines itself to end-user programming of the digital home, we argue that the underlying mechanisms and concerns apply to all levels of pervasive computing.