Designing socio-technical applications for ubiquitous computing: Results from a multidisciplinary case study

Abstract

A major challenge for ubiquitous system design is creating applications that are legal-compatible and accepted by their intended users. Today's European data protection principles contradict the ideas of ubiquitous computing. Additionally, users have to deal with unconventional interaction concepts leading to a low amount of trust and acceptance in such systems. Current development approaches do not sufficiently cover these concerns, as they do not systematically incorporate expertise from the relevant disciplines. We present a novel development approach for ubiquitous systems that explicitly addresses these concerns. Our primary task was to manage the increased number of stakeholders and dependencies, respectively conflicts between requirements of the particular disciplines. The approach incorporates predefined artifacts and a defined workflow with responsibilities, as well as suggesting how to develop mutual understanding. We apply this multidisciplinary approach to develop the ubiquitous application Meet-U. © 2012 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.