Ambient Interfaces: A Domestic UI that Complement the Human Environment

Our homes are becoming ever more connected. **Modem** joined forces with **Yujie Wang**, human-computer interaction researcher at MIT, and **Bram Fritz**, speculative designer, to explore what a less intrusive, less demanding version of the user interface at home could be like. Ambient Interfaces imagines a domestic UI that complements the human environment, rather than imposing itself upon the habitants.

TEXT: Drew Austin
IMAGES: Bram Fritz
DESIGN PRINCIPLES: Yujie Wang
Article link: https://modemworks.com/research/ambient-interfaces/

Keywords

Smart Home Interface, Ambient Computing, Mindful, Sensorial, Adaptive, Context-Aware, Responsible

Abstract

The future of the smart home lies in ambient intelligence. A more suitable approach to the domestic interface would move beyond the screen, incorporating design principles that better accommodate the humans who use these interfaces. Such an approach would be mindful, sensorial, adaptive, context-aware, and responsible.
It was an exciting collaboration with Bas Van De Poel, Astin le Clercq from Modem, speculative designer Bram Fritz (费伯翰), and writer Drew Austin to reflect on the development of smart home technology and to explore what a less intrusive, less demanding version of the user interface at home could be like. Ambient Interfaces imagines a domestic UI that complements the human environment, rather than imposing itself upon the habitants.

Digital technology has transformed countless facets of life in recent decades, but one of its most significant upheavals has been the home, a domain that has exhibited little outward change. Stodgy and slow to adapt, domestic space has lagged the disruptive fervor seen elsewhere; by staying relatively stable as everything around it has changed, the home has been recontextualized by technology, assuming entirely new roles and functions without visibly evolving much. Housing, as it turns out, is difficult for software to completely “eat,” as it is hard to melt down into pure information, and costly to retrofit.

At its most fundamental, a home is a shelter for the people who inhabit it permanently. But a home is also the site of a wide variety of activities, and the place where we keep the belongings that facilitate those activities. A growing number of these belongings are digital: recent replacements for analog household appliances and systems, now operated via user interfaces, such as connected lights, connected locks, and connected doorbells. As this technology continues to evolve, we layer these domestic interfaces onto the existing home, often haphazardly, without the necessary time or budget to seamlessly integrate the new and the old.

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DESIGNING AMBIENT INTERFACES
A more suitable approach to the domestic interface would move beyond the screen, incorporating design principles that better accommodate the humans who use these interfaces. Such an approach would be mindful, sensorial, adaptive, context-aware, and responsible — five key principles for designing ambient interfaces at home.

MINDFUL
Ambient interfaces in our domestic environments would offer a mindful alternative to the screen’s harsh attention grabs. Such interfaces would facilitate subconscious and intuitive interaction, rather than loudly announcing themselves. Mindfulness can be incorporated directly into household devices using technology such as wireless sensing and imperceptible computing, which would enable these interfaces to operate in the background rather than foreground, minimizing their presence and preserving a calm domestic environment for inhabitants’ usage.
SENSORIAL
Ambient interfaces would also interact with a wider range of human senses, particularly sound and touch, corresponding more fully to our actual experience of our environments. Screens are just one possible interface of many, offering a limited range of interaction possibilities that ambient interfaces would expand. Electronic textiles and auditory ambient feedback are just two promising avenues for engaging the senses of touch and hearing, respectively, encouraging more tactile and multi-sensorial interactions.
ADAPTIVE
Ambient interfaces would be adaptive and responsive to their users’ ever-changing needs, preserving their valuable attention and cognitive bandwidth by anticipating those users’ physical conditions and emotional states via sensory input, and tailoring their responses accordingly. Existing screen-based domestic interfaces are more likely to alter or manipulate their users’ emotional states than respond with empathy, as they frequently lack the capacity to do otherwise. Adaptive devices have the potential to make the home a more peaceful and comforting environment, as it should be.
CONTEXT-AWARE
Similarly, ambient interfaces would be aware of their physical context, gathering input from the home environment itself as well as from its inhabitants using device-free localization and context-aware computing. Together, these qualities will further enable these interfaces to disappear into the background, freeing the home’s occupants from the task of constantly attending to them, and achieving better alignment between humans and their domestic environment.
RESPONSIBLE
Finally, ambient interfaces in the home must assume responsibility for the intimacy of their setting. Privacy, of course, is of the utmost importance — this technology will adhere to privacy by design — as are reliability and inclusivity, which are supported by universal design principles. Unlike analog objects in the home, connected devices introduce more complexity along with the risks that accompany that complexity. If a home’s inhabitants cannot trust the digital tools they live with, no amount of utility will compensate for that.

Regardless of technological advancements, the home’s enduring purpose remains the same: to shelter its human inhabitants and to facilitate the wide variety of activities and tasks that they perform within. Metaphors like “a machine for living” attest to this broad purpose and describe its constantly evolving nature. Interfaces, along with digital technology itself, are recent additions to the domestic environment. Because their incorporation into the home has too often been haphazard and suboptimal, serving the needs of the devices themselves more than the humans who use them, this technology has not yet fulfilled its potential. By creating ambient interfaces according to a more intentional set of design principles, we can rectify this imbalance and affirm the home’s proper role as a support system for the humans who live within — making it a true operating system for living.