Human-machine interaction in ubiquitous application design

With the proliferation of communication technologies and mobile electronic devices, there is a fast growing need of ubiquitous applications. However, designing ubiquitous applications faces a lot of challenges, and many of them actually comes from human rather than from computers. Furthermore, the primary focus in ubiquitous application development has been application-centric and on specialized applications over a specific systems, such as the iPhone apps. Very often the designers have ignore the human-centric perspective of these applications, as well as the interactions among applications. We envision that an urban-scale ubiquitous network will take place, and connect many daily applications together. Most importantly, the new paradigm is human-centric, as opposed to people being bystanders of the system. In order for these applications to be sustainable, they must provide a human-centric protocol that specifies the rules of the system. However, the process of designing such protocols is not an easy task, especially in a distributed environment where there are a large variety of devices with different capabilities, or when users have disparate interests on their own. In this paper, we present the challenges in this new area, and argue the need to develop a theory for providing fundamental methodologies in designing human-centric ubiquitous systems and applications.