Mapping interactions in a pervasive home environment

Abstract

This work focuses on the visualisation of interactions in a pervasive home environment. Home as a space and as an activity container is traditionally linked to the habitual acts of the inhabitants. However, the infiltration of wireless connectivity, throughout the home and external to it, suggests that, in contrast to the traditional notion of hominess, we as inhabitants do not have the means to perceive significant data connections that take place throughout our home. These connections may range from simple data transfer to sensing and decision making, all taking place around our home and unseen. To this end we have tried to find the means to represent these connections in a visual way, in order to provide a tool that will help to reveal the structure, form and perplexity of digital connections to the inhabitants of a pervasive home environment. The study concludes that in order to visualise all this data, maps have to be formed that include both the material and immaterial infrastructure of home, as well as the connection between them and the rest of the world. These maps are bound to have the characteristics of centralised, distributed and decentralised networks, rendering them as hybrid maps, depending on the type of information they deal with. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.