The era of ubiquitous computing in the home is here, thanks to the popularity and affordability of communications, media, and storage devices. Today a home might be equipped with a broadband router, wireless access point, IP telephone, media center PC, networked attached storage (NAS), digital video recorder, music players, and game consoles capable of Internet play. However, this kind of ubiquitous computing, once hoped to be both invisible and seamless, is already showing its seams. Rather than making life simple and easy, today's technology often makes life more complex. People expect devices to work easily, intuitively, and to play nicely together. Instead, many consumers devote evenings and weekends to the overhead of connecting and configuring laptops, desktops, wireless networks, home theater systems, and other devices that promise new and exciting capabilities.
The research proposed here seeks to characterize the breakdowns and develop technical solutions that simplify how individuals incorporate networked digital devices into their homes and digital lifestyle. Fieldwork will identify breakdowns and solution methods for users of networked devices. The field study findings will articulate a set of requirements for a contextual recommendation system that will recommend approaches that simplify adoption and use of networked devices in the home. Focusing on interoperability with media devices could be considered high risk because the low rates of end-user adoption for these devices may make it difficult to find individuals who can participate in the research. An additional complication when addressing network interoperability is that these types of problems can often result in the home network being non-operational. Thus some common approaches for getting help, like searching the Internet, may not be not practical.
The intellectual merit of the proposed research is three fold. The proposed research will develop a new method (problem solving probes) to overcome methodological problems of studying the home network. The research will result in a situated typology of interoperability problems and solution approaches that users currently employ. Lastly, the results will be used to develop a prototype interoperability assistant that identifies where conceptual problems arise in a user?s home network.
The results of the research will have several broader impacts. The direct impacts are for the millions of users who are attempting to adopt a growing number of networked devices for the home. The infrastructure developed will reduce the overhead of resolving complex interoperability problems by identifying and recommending the most effective solutions. The results inform the design of devices and services aimed at solving network device interoperability in the digital home. Thus, this renews the promise of a more seamless computing environment in the home.
