Domestic Pervasive Information Systems: End-user programming of digital homes

The chapter presents the background to the development of the digital home of the future and the ways in which it might be controlled by the end-user. We describe the technical background to the development of the digital home out of the ubiquitous availability of networks and devices. We then describe two different approaches to user control that are already under development ? Task Based Computing (TBC) and Pervasive Interactive Programming (PiP). We discuss theoretical work on combining, formalising and visualising these processes. In addition we report on a user evaluation that demonstrates that non-expert users find these methods to be simple, enjoyable and useful. Although this chapter confines itself to end-user programming of the digital home we argue that the underlying mechanisms and concerns apply to all levels of pervasive computing.