Designing Pervasive and Multimodal Interactive Systems

This chapter presents a participatory and evolutionary methodology for pervasive and multimodal interactive systems design that is being developed capitalizing experiences from different target applicative domains. The methodology supports collaborative and evolutionary design of an interactive system; it considers usability problems that users face during the interaction; it is based on a network of software environments, conceived in analogy with the workshop of an artisan, each one customizable to and tailorable by users belonging to different cultures. The requirements, design issues, and a proposal of the architecture of the software environment will be discussed highlighting their pervasiveness, multimodality, and interactivity, the ability offered to users to coordinate desktop and mobile devices, and to access a shared knowledge base. The architecture has been defined and revised exploiting experience gained from different case studies that will be illustrated. The novelty of the approach is that the methodology sprang from empirical experience got by handling problems faced on the field. In the chapter, specific aspects of the presented approach are discussed in relation to the state of the art.